The U.S. government doesn’t want you to read what Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has to say. In July 2025, the State Department announced that it was going to freeze her assets for her “lawfare that targets U.S. and Israeli persons.”
Albanese, the State Department press release noted, had “directly engaged with the International Criminal Court (ICC)” at The Hague “in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel, without the consent of those two countries.” And she had “recently escalated this effort by writing threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations.”
A few weeks earlier, Albanese had submitted her report to the U.N. Human Rights Council, “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide.” It accuses several global companies of profiting “from the Israeli economy of illegal occupation, apartheid and now genocide,” including Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Palantir, Caterpillar, and even Booking.com. (The report also mentions that companies have been asked for comment, which appears to be the “threatening letters” referred to by the State Department.)
Whether or not one accepts Albanese’s characterization of Israel’s actions, the report itself is an interesting read on the economics of war. The report details how some firms profit directly from providing the state with the tools to inflict violence while others take advantage of the state’s monopoly on violence to grab a monopoly on resources. Albanese calls for international sanctions, legal action, and consumer boycotts aimed at changing these companies’ behavior.
The U.S. government’s attempts to stop the report from being published in the first place make it especially worth reading. Politicians have long wanted to erode Americans’ right to vote with their wallets, and they’ve used boycotts of Israel as a test case to introduce wide-ranging anti-boycott laws. By accusing the United Nations of “lawfare” for simply printing a report, the government is attacking the right of consumers and investors to hear information that lets them make politically conscious decisions.
The Palestinian rights movement has made boycotts a central pillar of its activism, but the actual choice of targets has often been sloppy and incoherent. Activists have gone after Coca-Cola and Pepsi as vague symbols of America and Starbucks over a union dispute that tangentially involved Palestinian symbolism. The infamous protests at Columbia University focused on cutting indirect ties to weapons companies.
Hellbound and Down 