In 2016, Facebook’s top executives arrived in Israel to sign a partnership with the government to “monitor and control” the spread of incitement on the platform. This came two years after Israel’s brutal airstrikes on Gaza in 2014 that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians and injured over 10,000. As the military carried out massacres on the ground, Zionist users flooded Facebook with open calls for murder – the platform of choice for rallying violence against Palestinians. Posts reading “Kill them while they are still in their mother’s womb” became routine. When reported, Facebook’s response was chilling in its consistency: this did not violate its policies, so the content would stay. So would the profiles and pages hosting it.
In 2016 alone, 60,000 Zionists posted 675,000 racist or inflammatory messages against Arabs on social media – a 141% increase from the 280,000 recorded the previous year. That’s the equivalent of one hateful post every 46 seconds, every single day, for an entire year.
And yet, the partnership Facebook forged with the Israeli government was not designed to curb this stream of anti-Palestinian violence. Instead, it targeted the very voices resisting occupation – casting Palestinians as the threat, while letting the real incitement thrive. In a statement at the time, Facebook said, “online extremism can only be tackled with a strong partnership between policymakers, civil society, academia and companies, and this is true in Israel and around the world,” adding that its content moderation policies “make it clear there is no place for terrorists or content that promotes terrorism on Facebook.”
This is neither new nor surprising – a tech corporation siding with Israel’s agenda against Palestine and its people over universally recognised human rights is practically the rule, not the exception. But it speaks to something deeper: the long-standing alliances between corporations and governments across the world. Jillian C. York, in her book Silicon Values, recalls the late 2000s, when governments were on a censorship spree, blocking websites and silencing online spaces at scale. No platform was spared from government censorship – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tumblr – anywhere people could raise their voices. Back then, tech companies positioned themselves as victims of authoritarian repression. Today, the dynamic has flipped. Those same companies now wield the power to police speech worldwide. As York writes, “Although they lack the heavy weaponry of nation-states, the role of dominant platforms in the international legal order increasingly resembles that of sovereign states.” Every day, this becomes more painfully true.
The partnership runs both ways, serving the interests of each side. Governments increasingly collaborate with platform executives, while platforms operate as unaccountable arbiters, signing deals with states without the slightest meaningful due diligence on the human rights abuses those agreements enable.
Israel has long been a favoured partner for Big Tech, not only because of its dominance in the global surveillance industry – a perfect match for corporate business models built on data extraction, but also because of its ideological alignment with Western governments whose own colonial histories echo Israel’s existence. It’s no coincidence that every multimillion- and billion-dollar tech corporation maintains close ties with the Israeli state, as though such relationships were a prerequisite for staying in business.
In August 2025, The Guardian revealed that Microsoft has been providing Israel with virtually unlimited Azure cloud storage to hold audio recordings of phone calls between Palestinians – data collected through mass surveillance. However, true to the Big Tech playbook, Microsoft told The Guardian that it had no knowledge of the nature of the data Israel intended to store. As one source in The Guardian article puts it, “you don’t have to be a genius to figure it out,” adding, “you tell [Microsoft] we don’t have any more space on the servers, that it’s audio files. It’s pretty clear what it is.”
What does surprise me, and only slightly, is the brazenness of that defence. Companies like Microsoft, Meta, Google, and others are notoriously strategic about the contracts they sign and the commitments they make, knowing full well the PR and legal implications. I know this from over a decade of working in digital rights in the Global South, where even the simplest request, say, to remove graphic, violent content, required these companies multiple internal consultations before any decision was made. That level of due diligence is built into how these corporations operate.
So when Microsoft claims ignorance about the scope of a potentially multimillion-dollar contract with a regime known for its entrenched control and systemic repression of Palestinians, it’s not just implausible, it’s insulting to the international human rights frameworks. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights state that, “Business should exercise heightened due diligence in conflict-affected contexts because of the increased risk of being involved in serious human rights abuses.”
For a company that spends millions every month safeguarding its image and limiting legal liability, pleading unawareness is less a statement of fact than a calculated bet that the world will once again look away. This wilful ignorance is not just indefensible, it’s an admission for future violations.
Gayatari Khandadai, the Head of Technology and Human Rights at the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC), said in the Centre’s media response, “Claims of ignorance in the context of this conflict provide no cover for these companies. Heightened human rights due diligence in conflict isn’t optional; it’s the bare minimum to avoid allegations of complicity in violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.” She adds, “The more severe the risks to people the company could be connected to, the more sophisticated this due diligence needs to be – and there is no question that the unfolding genocide in Gaza requires this level of assessment.”
Big Tech’s militarised involvement in genocide
These are far from the only examples of Big Tech, and an extension of US imperial power, supporting Israel’s occupation and colonial project in Palestine. Microsoft Azure has been used by the Israeli military to run its app ‘Al Munaseq’ that manages permit applications required by Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza for work, commerce, family visits, medical and legal needs.
According to Who Profits, an independent research centre working to expose the role of the private sector in Israel’s occupation industry, as of November 2021, the app was used by at least half a million Palestinians. Their report on Microsoft mentions, “in addition to the provision of general information such as their name, ID and phone number, users have to give access to their phone’s IP address, geographic location, access to the camera and to files stored on the mobile device, and consent to the extraction and storage of the data by the Israeli military, and of sharing the information with third parties such as other government authorities.”
In addition, the report further mentions, “The company provided the military with servers to store the applications’ information, and senior programmers of the company guided and advised in the development process.”
Jalal Abukhater, the Advocacy Manager at the Palestinian digital rights organisation, 7amleh, says, “Those capabilities transform occupation practices into a highly data-driven apparatus that makes large-scale, automated targeting a possibility.”
Surveillance of this kind is nothing new for authoritarian or quasi-democratic governments, and certainly not for Israel known to extensively surveil Palestinians and is committing genocide since almost two years. It has built an entire export industry around invasive technologies first tested on Palestinians.
Intel has maintained a deep partnership with the Israeli government for years, including a now-halted plan to build a semiconductor chip plant in Israel worth US$25 billion. And similar to Microsoft’s contract, Google and Amazon in 2021 signed a still-active US$1.2 billion contract for Project Nimbus, supplying cloud computing to Israel’s defence establishment, that one Israeli colonel described as “a weapon in every sense of the word”. This infrastructure enables Israel to store, process, and analyse Palestinians’ facial recognition data, biometric information, emotional recognition metrics, and demographic profiles.
In 2024, employees at Google and Amazon in the United States organised protests and launched the No Tech for Apartheid campaign, demanding the companies end their role in the occupation. The corporates responded with public assurances to the Israeli government that the contract would proceed exactly as planned.
York points out in Silicon Values, “[The backdoor collaborations between government and platforms] take a number of forms but their effect is often the same, and in essence, they constitute the powerful teaming up against the relatively powerless in opaque and unaccountable ways.”
So while the scale of Israel’s surveillance isn’t surprising, the active complicity of a global corporation in enabling it demands scrutiny.
Francesca Albenese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestinian Territories, in her latest report From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide, mentions, “as corporate actors have contributed to the destruction of Palestinian life in the occupied Palestinian territory, they have also helped construction of what replaces it: building colonies and their infrastructure, extracting and trading materials, energy and agricultural products, bringing visitors to colonies as if to a regular holiday destination. Post-October 2023, these activities have sustained unprecedented growth in the settlement enterprise, with corporate entities continuing to power and profit from the creation of conditions of life calculated to destroy the Palestinian population, including through the near-total shutdown of water, electricity and fuel.”
Israel’s surveillance export machinery
Artificial intelligence has long been used by Israel to continue its genocide against Palestinians, and to enable governments around the world to commit human rights atrocities against their own citizens. The regime has become a global supplier of surveillance technology, building a multibillion dollar industry. It has promoted its military grade technology as “battle-tested” – a marketing term for “tested on Palestinians”, to entice governments in to buy these tools of repression.
Albanese, in her recent report, says, “repression of Palestinians has become progressively automated, with tech companies providing dual-use infrastructure to integrate mass data collection and surveillance, while profiting from the unique testing ground for military technology offered by the occupied Palestinian territory.”
7amleh writes in its December 2023 report, Israel’s Surveillance Industry and Human Rights: Impact on Palestinians and Worldwide, “[…] because Palestinian civilians living under military rule are denied recourse to civil rights protections by an occupying army, there are very few checks on how the military deploys surveillance technologies in the occupied territories. Remarking on this dynamic, scholars and human rights organizations have recently suggested that Palestinians offer up a cheap reserve of raw data for private companies eager to test out and refine surveillance systems before exporting them abroad.”
Abukhater says, “Palestinians have long been subject to real-world testing of surveillance and offensive cyber technologies, from biometric systems and facial recognition to spyware like Pegasus, because Israel’s security-linked start-up ecosystem is closely intertwined with military and intelligence units.” Referring to the recently published report by UNSR Albanese, Jalal says it “corroborates this dynamic, showing how cloud, AI and predictive policing tools developed or refined in Palestine are packaged and sold internationally, creating a commercial cycle that monetises repression and normalises technologies of control.”
The reach of Israeli surveillance technologies extends far beyond Palestine, finding buyers in governments from Mexico to Russia, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia and beyond, where the same tools are deployed to stifle dissent, surveil activists, and exert authoritarian control, closing the loop between occupation, profit, and global repression.
Who Profits, writes on their website, “Israeli and international companies profit from, sustain and bolster Israel’s military-industrial complex. Systematic violence inflicted on Palestinian bodies also serves as a testing ground for such companies’ technology.”
Advanced tech in modern warfare
Albanese mentions in her report, “The military-industrial complex has become the economic backbone of the State,” pointing out that, “Israeli tech firms often grow out of military infrastructure and strategy.”
In the ongoing genocide, the Israeli military employed AI systems, including ‘Lavendar’, ‘Gospel’, and ‘Where’s Daddy’, that identified over 37,000 Palestinians as militants and marked locations of their homes as airstrike targets, limiting human intervention to mere 20 seconds on each bombing. The 2024 investigation into these systems revealed that these AI-systems were known to make ‘errors’ in at least 10% of the cases. The Guardian wrote in April 2024, “Israel’s use of powerful AI systems […] has entered uncharted territory for advanced warfare, raising a host of legal and moral questions, and transforming the relationship between military personnel and machines.”
The integration of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence into Israel’s military and policing operations points at a dangerous phase in what can only be described as the “human rights violation industry.” These systems go beyond simply watching, instead, they predict and pre-empt, automating the targeting of individuals, their entire families, and communities in complete disregard for the value of human life or rights.
Big Tech’s role and complicity in this evolution of human rights violation is foundational. Cloud computing platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, combined with Google’s AI analytics, offer Israel the infrastructure it needs to collect, store, and process terabytes of data harvested through its surveillance apparatus. This includes facial recognition at checkpoints, biometric data from population registries like Al Munaseq, and communications intercepted through mass surveillance. When these datasets are fed into AI systems, they create a detailed, constantly updated map of Palestinian life that can be used to profile, predict, and kill civilians, as has been happening in the ongoing genocide.
The surveillance capitalism that Big Tech built to extract value from consumer behaviour, like tracking clicks, purchases, and social interactions to serve personalised ads, are now repurposed for military-grade population control. Algorithms that once decided which shoe ad you saw on Facebook are recalibrated to decide who is stopped at a checkpoint, whose home is bombed, or whose name appears on a kill list. The logic is the same, that is, collect as much behavioural data as possible, analyse it for patterns, and monetise the result. Except here, the profit is the annihilation of a population.
These are present realities of an industry, showing how technology envisioned and developed in corporate boardrooms and sold under the banner of innovation, can become a weapon of occupation and genocide.
Albanese says in her report, “this is a “joint criminal enterprise”, where the acts of one ultimately contribute to a whole economy that drives, supplies and enables this genocide.” Big Tech’s involvement in Israel’s occupation and genocide against Palestinians is not the result of corporate naivety or lack of awareness, it’s a business model that is designed and perfected over the years to strengthen revenue streams that are filled with the blood, lives and freedom of Palestinians.
Is accountability possible?
I keep coming back to the question of whether corporate accountability is even possible at this moment. Big Tech’s role, and that of other corporations, in advancing Israel’s project of erasing Palestine and Palestinian identity is not happening in a vacuum. It is being carried out with the active support, or at least the agreement, of the very governments that should be holding these companies to account. That reality is compounded by the failure of international human rights bodies and mechanisms, which have consistently fallen short of protecting Palestinians and those who stand in solidarity with them.
Albanese points out that, “Business and human rights obligations cannot be isolated from Israel’s illegal settler-colonial enterprise in the occupied Palestinian territory,” and suggests that to ensure accountability, Member States should ensure that “corporate entities face legal consequences for their involvement in serious violations of international law.”
She says that corporations should “promptly cease all business activities and terminate relationships directly linked with, contributing to and causing human rights violations and international crimes against the Palestinian people, in accordance with international corporate responsibilities and the law of self-determination.”
Abukhater from 7amleh emphasises that, “corporate accountability must go beyond voluntary measures.” He adds, “companies must undertake meaningful human-rights due diligence consistent with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, backed by mandatory requirements and regulatory actions on any company that enable or facilitate serious [violation of international humanitarian law] and human rights abuses.”
He argues that existing accountability methods will remain ineffective in holding Big Tech accountability without targeted measures that govern exports, military procurement and corporate operations.
When governments are complicit and global accountability systems have failed, corporations can fund and enable apartheid, surveillance, and genocide without fear of consequence. Profit becomes the only principle and the foundation of every contract. And somehow the burden to change this equation falls on the very people whose lives, livelihoods, freedoms, and safety are already under attack, targeted by the same platforms that claim to protect them.
