28.08.2025

Corporates are complicit

Firms such as BCG and Microsoft are up to their necks in Israel’s genocidal crimes, writes Eddie Ford. Unsurprisingly workers are expressing their outrage

Hannah Arendt famously wrote about the “banality of evil” regarding Adolf Eichmann and his 1961 Jerusalem trial - though, of course, Eichmann was no mere bureaucrat, as he made out in his defence, but a committed Nazi who took part in the January 1942 Wannsee conference and was an active participant in the genocidal Final Solution. As we are seeing right now, the parallels with Israel are undeniable - but the big difference is that it is committing genocide in real time that everyone can see for themselves and appears to have no intention of stopping until the job is effectively completed.

There are, therefore, plenty of corporate Eichmanns operating in full view, even if some now, because of public outrage, would like to distance themselves from their crimes. We saw this recently with the Boston Consulting Group, one of the world’s big three management consulting firms. On July 4 the Financial Times ran a major story about how it had modelled the costs of “relocating” Palestinians from Gaza, and entered into a multimillion-dollar contract to help launch the hideous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation - which, as the world knows, was deliberately created so that Israel could boot out the UN Relief and Works Agency, with its 400 distribution sites, and replace them with four ‘food aid hubs’ - making the GHF integral to the Israeli genocide.

And a month later, on July 5, the FT ran a follow-up story about the nauseating involvement of the Tony Blair Institute with the BCG by taking part in a ‘post-war’ Gaza plan that actually envisaged resuscitating the strip with a “Trump Riviera” and an “Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone” - spearheaded by Israeli companies under a redevelopment programme called the ‘Great Trust’. Keeping in line with the Trump agenda, it raised the possibility of paying half a million Palestinians to leave the area and attracting private investors to develop Gaza. According to “sources familiar with the effort”, Israel and the US were interested in resettling Gazans in regions of Puntland and Somaliland - both of which expressed willingness to enter discussions on the matter in exchange for diplomatic recognition. There was no concern for the Gazan people, of course, who were totally expendable.

But the FT ran a further story at the weekend, which offers at least some small degree of encouragement, about how the BCG has been “confronted with an outpouring of anger and disappointment” within their Middle Eastern office following its role in setting up the horribly misnamed GHF.¹

An unofficial WhatsApp group was set up by outraged BCG staff and alumni to support Palestine, and it became a forum for expressing their disgust, with one worker writing: “I don’t know how are we supposed to go back to work and our normality, knowing how much pain and suffering is still happening and that our organisation was part of a horrific plan”. There was also a comment by Ihab Khalil, a BCG partner who works with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and has been described as “one of the region’s most powerful consultants”. Khalil wrote on the same WhatsApp group that “I ran out of shoulders to cry on. I feel betrayed!!!” - adding “sorry for this emotion”, but “for once I am ashamed”.

Getting desperate to dampen down the escalating scandal, two executives who knew about the “relocating” project have been stripped of their management roles, though BCG claims they were “misled” by the partners involved. BCG also disavowed the modelling work, alleging that the lead partner was “told not to do without input from the local population”. Unsurprisingly, this did not satisfy the rising concerns and the FT details that by mid-July employees were gathering signatures for a proposed letter to the chief executive demanding stronger action, including greater accountability and donations to support humanitarian causes for Palestinians. Separately, a BCG alumni group organised a letter of protest to Christoph Schweizer, the chief executive, that attracted more than 100 signatures - calling the GHF and its modelling work “a staggering ethical failure” and “a collapse in judgment, process and responsibility at multiple levels of leadership”.

As further revealed by the FT (this would almost be amusing if it was not so serious), Schweizer’s attempts to ease tensions over Gaza totally backfired at a July 17 town hall meeting that was held at three locations, with executives presenting from Riyadh and Doha alongside Schweizer in Dubai, where around 370 people attended. Amazingly, while the sites were connected, no livestream was made available for people who could not be there in person - then things got even worse when Schweizer began the meeting by saying that he “would not comment on the conflict” in Gaza or “the politics of the region”, going on to say that BCG, in common with other firms, seeks to maintain an “apolitical stance” and would not compromise that position - a stupendous exercise in hypocrisy. Then, when one questioner described Israel’s government as a genocidal regime, surely a statement of fact, Schweizer said that genocide was a “big word” - a remark that angered some members of the audience, who left the room.

Since then, some staff in the Middle East have argued that BCG should take a public stance against Israel’s genocidal offensive or shut down the firm’s office in Tel Aviv. For all the efforts by BCG to stop the internal tensions spilling out into the open, workers, most highly paid, are determined to voice opposition to the genocide.

A similar story happened on August 26 at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.² At least two current and three former employees, as well as two other tech workers, were arrested after staging a sit-in demonstration at the company president’s office, urging that Microsoft should cut ties with the Israeli government. Other employees, former staff and supporters also gathered outside the HQ. Police placed the protestors in full-body harnesses and carried them out of the building, but Abdo Mohamed, a former Microsoft worker who helped organise the demonstration, declared that “no arrests, no violence will deter us from continuing to speak up”.

The demonstration was part of a series of actions organised by current and former staff over Microsoft’s cloud contracts with the Israeli government. It arose after a joint investigation by The Guardian, Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call revealed earlier this month that Israel’s military surveillance agency, Unit 8200, was making use of Microsoft’s Azure software to store countless recordings of mobile phone calls made by Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza.

The company, of course, said it was not aware of “the surveillance of civilians or collection of their mobile phone conversations using Microsoft’s services”, and was supposedly launching an independent investigation into the use of its Azure software. But activists wanted to escalate action, as they know the company is lying through its teeth, seeking help from the FBI to track protests and working with local authorities to stop their activities.

Microsoft is completely involved with Israel on all sorts of levels, as one of the protestors powerfully pointed out - “You continue to try to bury your head in the sand, so we are here today outside your blood-soaked thrones, to continue pulling your baby-killer necks out of your sand holes and continue to force you to confront your complicity, until you stop powering the murdering of our people.”

The same is true in the UK, it goes without saying. Flagship companies like Rolls Royce, BAE and GE Aviation are the second biggest source for parts and components for the F-35, the top-rung fighter in the Israeli airforce. These and other companies are helping to strengthen Israel’s killing machine, making Britain fully complicit.