30 October 2025. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and the Corporatisation of Genocide with Jessica Whyte
On May 19th, the Israeli Prime Minister’s office announced that, after blocking all food from entering Gaza for eleven weeks, it would allow a limited amount of “basic food” into the besieged territory. At the same time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that “Israel will act to deny Hamas the ability to seize control of the distribution of humanitarian aid in order to ensure that the aid does not reach Hamas terrorists”.
This paper examines the new militarised aid delivery system approved by Israel’s security cabinet, with a focus on ‘the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)’, an opaque private company initially headquartered in Geneva, which Israel tasked with aid distribution, and whose ‘aid’ sites have become the scenes of near-daily massacres. I focus on the plans for the GHF developed by the Boston Consulting Group, which also modelled the cost of paying Palestinians to leave Gaza. In this privatized vision, Gaza’s Palestinian people were conceived not as a substantial part of a national collective with the right to self-determination, but as individual subjects of interest who can be enticed to “voluntarily” choose exile from Gaza and the abandonment of their relationship to their land. I show that the corporate logic of efficiency promoted by neoliberal consultants ultimately buttressed the genocidal logic of Israel’s war, making the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation a corporate agent of genocide.
Jessica Whyte is an Associate Professor of Philosophy and Law at the University of New South Wales, and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Her work integrates political philosophy, intellectual history and political economy to analyse contemporary forms of sovereignty, human rights, humanitarianism and militarism. She has a particular interest in the political stakes of mobilizing the category of the human, and in the way claims to protect humanity are bound up with rationalizations for abandoning certain lives and for state-sanctioned killing. She has published widely on human rights, humanitarianism, and neoliberalism, and contemporary European philosophy in a range of fora – including Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism and Development; Law and Critique; Political Theory; South Atlantic Quarterly; The Journal of Genocide Research; and Theory and Event. She is the author of two published monographs: Catastrophe and Redemption: The Political Thought of Giorgio Agamben (SUNY, 2012), and The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso, 2019). She is currently working on an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project on Economic Sanctions after the Cold War.
30 October 2025, 2-3pm, MLS. Register here.