UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 joins Clara Mattei to follow the money behind Israel’s occupation of Palestine: the banks, tech giants, arms makers and pension funds that sustain it.

In July 2025, Albanese presented her report From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide to the UN Human Rights Council, naming 48 companies across weapons, surveillance, heavy machinery, tourism, energy and finance. BlackRock and Vanguard appear as leading shareholders across many of them. The United States then sanctioned her personally, freezing her accounts and affecting her family. Albanese explains why this investigation into business complicity drew the harshest response of her entire mandate.

The conversation moves from finance to law and lived experience. Albanese explains how the word “conflict” hides the asymmetry between occupier and occupied, what the legal definition of apartheid means for Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and what her investigation into the detention of Palestinian children revealed about military courts and carceral control. She also connects rising military spending in the US and Europe to cuts in housing, health and education at home. She closes with sumud, the Palestinian practice of steadfastness, and her image of trees sustaining one another through their roots in a dry season, as a model for solidarity in a dark political moment.

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