In a historic testimony before the tribunal’s jury, Varoufakis — a leading theorist and former Greek finance minister — declared that the dynamics of contemporary capitalism are fully complicit in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians. He stressed that the ongoing atrocities in Gaza are not simply the result of military decisions but a deeply profitable phenomenon for global networks of capital.
According to Varoufakis, “Genocide is profitable,” because capitalism extracts profit from suffering, destruction, and death. Citing financial data, he noted that while Israel’s production, consumption, and public confidence indicators have plummeted, its stock market has surged by more than 160% since the start of the Gaza offensive. This surge, he explained, stems from the influx of foreign investment and the unprecedented expansion of Israel’s defense budget — turning the war machine into an engine of economic growth.
Varoufakis added that thousands of Israeli companies are intricately linked to economic giants across the United States, Europe, and East Asia — including financial, military, and tech corporations that have played a central role in funding and arming Israel’s military since October 2023. Citing Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, he noted that the “economy of occupation” has now evolved into an “economy of genocide.”
In his view, the history of colonialism has always been inseparable from economic interests. From the Dutch and British East India Companies to the modern arms and technology industries, corporations have long been the driving force of empire and violence. Zionist colonialism, he argued, follows the same logic. In Varoufakis’s reading, Palestine embodies three historical stages of dispossession: first, the plunder of land and the reduction of indigenous people to cheap labor; second, the era of neo-imperialism, driven by the need to create markets for surplus goods and weapons of Western powers; and third, the current phase — techno-feudalism — in which “cloud capital” dominates through data, algorithms, and digital surveillance.
In this new phase, as Varoufakis put it, “cloud capital” is no longer stored in factories but in servers, phones, and algorithms. “We feed this capital so that it learns about us, predicts us, and controls us,” he explained. “Its owners, in doing so, have acquired unprecedented power over humanity.”
Varoufakis warned that Israel has become one of the world’s main testing grounds for this new form of capital. The unprecedented access of companies such as IBM, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Palantir to biometric data, facial-recognition algorithms, and automated targeting systems has turned Gaza into the world’s largest live laboratory for military artificial intelligence. These technologies, after being tested through the killing of Palestinians, return to global markets as commercial and consumer products. The same algorithms that select military targets today, he warned, will tomorrow shape shopping habits, online behaviour, and public discourse worldwide.
“War has always been profitable,” he said. “But now cloud capital extracts data, algorithms, and experience from every war. The very software used to identify targets in Gaza will guide digital advertising tomorrow — manipulating consumer behavior.”
From this perspective, Varoufakis argued, the line between battlefield and marketplace has disappeared, as both serve the accumulation of power and profit by major corporations. The war in Gaza is not an exception, he said, but rather a model for a new economic mechanism in which technology and capital operate simultaneously as tools of domination and accumulation.
He warned that the freedom of nations around the world is now intertwined with the fate of the Palestinian people: “If today cloud capital grows from the blood-soaked data of Gaza, tomorrow the same technology will be used for social control in Europe, America, and Asia.”
Concluding his testimony, Varoufakis urged the jury to recognize that contemporary capitalism — in its turn toward data and surveillance — is reproducing violence as a mechanism of profit. “Ethnic cleansing in Palestine,” he said, “is, economically speaking, a global project. From Wall Street to Tel Aviv, from tech hubs to arms factories, immense profits are being made from human suffering. Corporate accountability, financial transparency, and the cessation of military investment are the only ways to resist this deadly logic.
For Varoufakis, justice movements worldwide must unite to expose the networks of capital and technology profiting from genocide. He emphasized that the liberation of Palestine is not merely a political demand but a moral and universal necessity — for the freedom of all nations depends on ending the global economy of war and dispossession.
NOURNEWS