Occupation and control best describe the current state of global politics and the underlying legal frameworks. For me, the Palestinian crisis sits on the tip of the occupational mountain. The deliberate framework for controlling Palestinian lives clashes with all forms of humanitarian regulation and common conduct. The legal enforcement of said frameworks is facilitated through major states, but through the back-end stakeholders, neo-colonial companies stand to gain the most, both in profits and extended impunity.

In the midst of early conversations about Palestine, I was given On Palestine by Pappe and Chomsky. The ideological explanation helped, but the itch to find the figures came quickly. First, I directed myself to the Gaza Marine Gas Field, and found that 90% of the one trillion cubic foot field had been given to British Gas in 1999 ^[1]. This led me down a spiral of the economic benefits to Israel that occupational resource control provided, both to the state itself and its allies.

The next was water. Upon establishment of the Palestinian limited self-rule in 1996, an estimated 15-20% annual use of the West Bank’s water reserves has been used by Palestinians ^[2]. This figure is less for Gaza. Much of the water available is taken to Israeli territory. Land is the other key commodity that dominates the occupation’s portfolio. There’s been an 8% increase on the already worrying 77% taken in 1948, with 85% being occupied, excluding many settlement projects, by 2020 ^[3]. With the de facto annexation of much of Gaza, and state-funded settler violence across Palestinian territories, the lines are now too blurred to presume that any control of territory is encompassed in a form of sovereign rights.

The dominance of the private sector in the political economy of Palestine is covered in Francesca P. Albanese’s “From economy of occupation to economy of genocide” ^[4]. She discusses the origins of the charter companies, such as British Gas, which had been given extensive powers in Palestine under their limited liability structures. This is the same for several industries globally, with the oil and gas industry alone generating $3 billion a day in pure profit through its maintenance of neo-colonial structures. As such, Palestinian sovereign wealth is almost non-existent, and power reigns thin. Although some of the strongest to do it, they have struggled to integrate themselves or develop into an economic system fit for individual businesses or utility-based social solutions because of such harsh conditions imposed by Israel. Companies like Airbnb are allowed to conduct business on Israel’s occupational terms, exploiting real estate vulnerabilities in the Palestinian-occupied territories without any sense of accountability. This means plain and simple that multinationals ultimately have a newfound sense of impunity, and a far larger selection of rights than either Palestinians or even Israelis.

There’s been a ghostly erosion of Palestinians’ sovereignty, resources and entrepreneurial determination. Given also the distinction between the Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza or Israel, this completely opaque, unregulated framework for the Palestinian workforce is truly unjust and must worry all Western patriots of freedom. Israel has two banks available to the Palestinians, with the Israeli Shekel cementing itself as the occupational currency from the Oslo II Accord. One of the main provisions for the banks is that all loans or credit (as Western banks are framed around) have innate preliminary clauses maintaining that all money could have been used to finance terror-related activity ^[5]. This is, of course, a baseless attempt at long-term socio-economic control and negates the very question of sovereignty itself. This is becoming an ever-closer reality for the West with the possibility of centralised IDs, central bank digital currency proposals, or general autocratic surveillance mechanisms.

The idea that a state such as Israel could sit as a supporting economic framework for autonomy, in its current manner, is truly delusional. It sets a dangerous precedent that occupational powers, newly adapted to the recurring realist-power plays they enact, are plaguing the international economic order by using a plethora of excuses, namely the right to defence. This is shaping neo-colonialism, the demise of multilateralism, and the rise of neo-imperialism. The rise of runaway inflation, currency devaluation, ecological breakdown, widening inequality and possible AI-led mass unemployment requires democratic organisation and pragmatic re-addressments of kleptocratic actors. If we were to return to feudal arrangements, without an overarching structure of patriarchy, the free-trade space would now allow state-supported private empires capable of economically toppling major state powers.

This new form of global economic order could be considered whatever neo-variant you want; whatever it is, however, it encompasses a far wider encroachment on social mobilisation and our future liberties. Civil liberties are now non-negotiable agreements of exploitative financial funnels. There is a near full implementation of neo-colonial companies, or at least massive multinationals, being given extensive powers to use our data, resources and production power to fuel profit. It’s the newcomers in tech, military expansionism, and existing companies that are expanding regardless of the warzone they work within. The cross-over between the Western adoption and facilitation of Palantir, using Gaza as a technological case study, comes to mind ^[6,7,8]. Water and energy companies in the West have also become social contracts of undesired financial funnels due to government bailouts and corruption. What are the limits to the liberties taken by impune multinationals, and how is this going to affect our precious days on this planet?

This is increasingly worrying when finding hope for democratically led social projects. A rise in corporate power in the neo-imperialist space has 10-fold effects in the domestic political space. The finance is bigger, policies are more watered down, and acts of occupation are treated with passivity. Fictitious security claims or scrupulous social, political or economic power relationships now rule narratives outside of the mainstream. The supranational lack of accountability within their own conditions (UN mandates for example), have and do simply allow multilateral war crimes to occur, with the wider global society bound by several forms of the social contract for actions they have never voted for. This is forcing existential disillusionment and social denial of subliminal racism, conservative re-nationalisation, and patriotism due to lost trust in politics and the human race. The notion that we are far removed from such realities in Palestine and that this social shift won’t hit our societies strongly is again, tenuous. We are much closer to Palestinians than to elites.