Capitalism & Genocide: My testimony at the Gaza Tribunal, Istanbul 23-10-2025

On 23rd October, I testified in front of the Jury of Conscience in the context of the Gaza Tribunal. My speech focused on the economic forces underpinning the genocide of the Palestinian people. Here it is: 

My name is Yanis Varoufakis. I am an economist, a politician and activist representing Greece’s MeRA25 as well as the paneuropean radical movement DiEM25, and I am here in my capacity as an expert on the manner in which capitalist dynamics are fuelling and reinforcing the Genocide of the Palestinian people.

Today, with a view to assisting the jury to reach an informed verdict, I shall address the economic forces underpinning the complicity of global capital in, initially, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and, more recently, their genocide.

The jury should want to keep in mind that genocide pays. And, I shall be arguing later, it pays a great deal more now that a new form of capital is involved in its execution

To begin, the jury should want to acknowledge that capitalism thrives on human misery and in sheer destruction. There is, therefore, no paradox in the fact that, at a time when demand, production and consumer confidence are falling precipitously in Israel, the Israeli Stock Exchange not only did not fall since the Gaza genocide began but in fact it rose by more than 160%.

This reflects the underlying Political Economy of Occupation and, in particular, the manner in which thousands of Israeli companies are intertwined with US, European and Korean mega-corporations – including the world’s weightiest financial conglomerates – comprising an international network that kicked into overdrive after October 2023. The moment the Israeli defence budget doubled, it crowded in large ‘investments’ into Israel’s killing machine.

For more detailed information on this, the jury should take into account the Report to the United Nations published by Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Raporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories entitled ‘From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide’.

Of course, none of this is new. History teaches us that economic interests have been key drivers and enablers of colonial enterprises and often of the genocides they perpetrated. The corporate sector has been intrinsic to colonialism since its inception, with corporations – beginning with the Dutch and British East India Companies – historically contributing to the violence against, the exploitation, and ultimately the dispossession of Indigenous people and lands, a mode of domination known as racial colonial capitalism. Israel’s colonization of the occupied Palestinian lands could not have been an exception.

The jury should be aware of the manner in which Palestine today demonstrates all three phases of colonial expropriation:

First came the phase of unsophisticated expropriation – the brutal plunder of land and the conversion of indigenous people into cheap or even slave labour. That phase, which led to the rise of capitalism in the 18^th Century, was evidenced in Palestine since the Balfour Declaration and, much more so, during and in the aftermath of the Nakba. Palestinian land was brutally expropriated and Palestinians either turned into refugees or encased in Bantustans which ended up, until at least the second intifada, providing cheap labour to the colonisers.

The second phase of modern colonialism, also known as neoimperialism, did not so much concern the plunder of land as it was intended to secure markets for the surplus commodities of the capitalist metropoles that the capitalist metropoles could not absorb domestically due to insufficient domestic demand. This neoimperialist dimension also made its appearance in Palestine in connection to the plight of the Palestinian people as Israel began to absorb massive quantities of weaponry imported from the US, Germany and UK, thus contributing significantly to the aggregate demand in those countries. More recently still, the Israeli arms manufacturers have managed to enter this game as exporters – by exporting hi-tech weaponry tried and tested on the Palestinian population to foreign countries, including (shamefully) my own country, Greece, but Arab countries too.

The third phase of contemporary capital accumulation feeding expropriation at home and colonialism abroad, is the one I refer to as the technofeudal phase – a phase underpinned by the accumulation of a new, radical form of capital which I have called cloud capital.

The jury will want to note that cloud capital is a network of machines (comprising phones, tablets, servers and algorithms) which does something remarkable: we train it to train us to train it to know us well and, eventually, manipulate our behaviour and, therefore, giving the owners of this cloud capital exorbitant powers to do things to us against our will in their interest.

In this context, the jury should want to take into account the fact that no country has given as much access to a population’s biometric data as Israel has given to IBM. Since the Gaza genocide began, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Palantir have been expanding their cloud capital penetration at a breathtaking pace. Face recognition software, target selection algorithms and automated execution systems are being tested in real time, at will, and with fewer ethical constraints than in the case of experiments on laboratory rats. America’s Big Tech could not be happier.

War, ladies and gentlemen, was always lucrative. Arms dealers made fortunes from supplying weapons to the highest bidder. Indirectly, all sorts of capital – including capital that produced consumer goods – accumulated faster at times of war and destruction. But, in this technofeudal age, cloud capital accumulates new powers in the battlefields directly by improving its algorithms’ capacity to understand and to manipulate humans. Nothing helps cloud capital improve its efficiency than the real time experience of monitoring and manipulating the behaviour of combatants, of target-selectors, of the politicians that enable these target-selectors and, yes, tragically, of the population targeted for annihilation.

The jury should, therefore, be aware of the fact that today’s AI-targeting devices that maximise death and destruction in Gaza will tomorrow morning power up the Amazon or Google or Microsoft algorithms which make us buy stuff we neither need nor want; which poison our conversations in our social media; that drive increasingly dispossessed proletarians, drivers, nurses and warehouse workers.

In other words, I call upon the jury to note that what is happening in Palestine, the unfolding ethnic cleansing and genocide, is totally intertwined with the forms of exploitation and the toxification of our social milieu in the rest of the world. In this sense, yes, our freedom in the rest of the world is utterly intertwined with the liberation of Palestinians from colonialism, expropriation, fear and manipulation.

To conclude, I would like to thank the jury for its important work and to implore its members to pay attention to the manner in which capitalist dynamics, especially those underpinning the reproduction of cloud capital, are fuelling and reinforcing the Genocide of the Palestinian people.