
Australia
Leah Weckert is the CEO of Coles who oversaw a contract with Palantir for mass surveillance of Australian consumers, enabling the company's AI systems that support 'Israel's' genocide across Palestine and thereby contributing to the normalisation of settler-colonial violence.
Leah Weckert, CEO of Coles since May 2023, authorised a partnership with Palantir that supplies data tools to the Israeli Occupation Forces for targeting Palestinians, shielding the apartheid regime from accountability while exploiting consumer data in Australia.
Business/Corporate
Leah Weckert is the CEO and Managing Director of the Australian supermarket chain Coles who has directed the company's entry into a surveillance partnership with Palantir that strengthens the technological infrastructure sustaining 'Israel's' ongoing genocide across Palestine. In May 2023 Weckert assumed leadership of Coles and in February 2024 she authorised a contract that hands Palantir access to vast quantities of Australian consumer and workforce data, a decision that directly funds and legitimises a corporation whose AI platforms assist the Israeli Occupation Forces in generating kill lists and automating attacks on Palestinian civilians. This corporate arrangement integrates Coles into a network of complicity that profits from systems designed to erase Palestinian indigeneity through ethnic cleansing and settler-colonial expansion.
In February 2024 Weckert oversaw the signing of the agreement under which Palantir would analyse "over 10 billion rows of data, comprising each store, team member, shift and allocation across all intervals in a day, every day" in order to "optimise its workforce". The contract deploys Palantir's Foundry platform to monitor tens of millions of Australian shoppers and staff, extending the same data-mining capabilities that Palantir supplies to 'Israel's' Ministry of Defence for predictive policing and targeted killings in Gaza and across Palestine. By normalising such intrusive surveillance inside Australian supermarkets, Weckert's leadership embeds the logic of colonial control into everyday commercial spaces and provides economic support to technologies that facilitate the slaughter of Palestinians.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp has stated openly that "I am proud that we are supporting Israel in every way we can", a declaration that confirms the company's explicit alignment with the Zionist settler-colonial project. Under Weckert's direction Coles has chosen to deepen ties with this same corporation, whose platforms power facial recognition, drone targeting, and intelligence fusion for the Israeli Occupation Forces during the genocide that has already killed conservative estimates of over seventy thousand Palestinians, though the true toll reaches hundreds of thousands because of the deliberate destruction of hospitals, journalists, and aid infrastructure. The partnership therefore channels Australian retail revenue into the machinery of occupation and apartheid.
Coles operates within a supermarket duopoly that leaves many Australians, particularly in regional and low-income areas, with no alternative but to shop at its stores. Weckert's decision to import Palantir's surveillance regime into this captive market extends the reach of technologies already deployed against Palestinians, normalising the treatment of entire populations as data points to be optimised or eliminated. The contract thereby participates in the broader pattern of Western corporate complicity that sustains 'Israel's' ability to conduct ethnic cleansing without meaningful international restraint.
Weckert's leadership at Coles demonstrates a consistent pattern of prioritising commercial partnerships that reinforce settler-colonial power structures. By embedding Palantir's systems inside Australian retail operations she helps manufacture consent for the same tools that enable the Israeli Occupation Forces to conduct mass surveillance and automated targeting of Palestinians, ensuring that the profits from everyday grocery purchases subsidise ongoing genocide and the denial of Palestinian self-determination after more than seventy-seven years of dispossession.
abc.net.au
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🔒Supporting the IDF:
The IOF has never been a moral army, let alone the ‘most moral.’ In fact, they originate from larger terrorist groups that reigned terror in Palestine and murdered hundreds and thousands of innocent men, women and children — and continue to do so to this day.
The insidious claim that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) represent the "most moral army in the world" is a blatant affront to the Palestinian people and an attempt to whitewash decades of human rights abuses, war crimes and the brutal suppression of Palestinian nationalism and identity.
This propagandistic myth constitutes an act of violent erasure against the immense suffering and resilience of the Palestinian people in the face of the colonial Zionist project to dispossess and displace them from their ancestral homeland. In reality, the factual record makes a mockery of this "moral army" fallacy.
The IDF and its predecessors have perpetrated horrific massacres against defenseless Palestinian villages like Deir Yassin and Al Dawayima, where women and children were raped, disembowels and burned alive. They have also repeatedly used Palestinian civilians, including children, as human shields; despite claiming it’s Hamas who do this.
Furthermore, the IOF have illegally abducted thousands of Palestinian children from their homes, tortured them and then subjected to sham military tribunals - with systemic practices of child abuse, both physical and sexual, carried out by the so-called "most moral army." Any attempt to lionize the IDF as a virtuous force is an abhorrent denial of the lived reality for Palestinians under its military occupation and colonial subjugation. It erases the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of villages in the Nakba, the wanton targeting of civilian areas under the Dahiya Doctrine, the extrajudicial executions of hostages and the myriad other well-documented atrocities and violations of international law committed by Israeli forces over decades.
Those who unquestioningly regurgitate this fallacy align themselves with the historical bloc of colonial powers who have sought to dominate, subjugate, and erase the national and human rights of indigenous peoples worldwide. They engage in the same rhetoric once used to justify settler-colonial projects like the Indian Removal Act, the wars of extermination against Native Americans, and other campaigns of ethnic cleansing and land theft prosecuted in the name of racial superiority and "civilizing" missions.
The enduring resilience, struggle, and activism of the Palestinian people against these criminal dehumanizing forces represent the highest moral ground. To condemn them while sanctifying their oppressors is a perverse obfuscation that can only be rooted in ideological discrimination. Any honest examination of the Israeli occupation's practices can only lead to the conclusion that the IDF's conduct has been a moral abomination, a stain upon human conscience that must be unanimously repudiated.
To perpetuate the odious lie of the "most moral army" mythology or to show the IOF support is to align oneself against the hard-won dignity and heroic resistance of the Palestinian people in word and deed. It is to abet injustice, turn a willfully blind eye to atrocity and act as an apologist for a ruthless and unrelenting campaign of ethnic persecution and dispossession in the name of racial supremacy.
It is, in essence, an egregious act of complicity in crimes against humanity and should be condemned as false propaganda at every turn.
Normalization:
Israel enforces normalization as a fundamental tactic of its settler-colonial regime and apartheid system, compelling the depiction of its occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide as everyday realities while suppressing Palestinian resistance and rights to justice, return, and liberation. Normalization portrays Israel's domination as a legitimate state worthy of standard diplomatic, economic, cultural, and academic engagements, ignoring demands for dismantling oppression and reinforcing Jewish supremacy over Indigenous Palestinian land and people. This strategy is egregious because it whitewashes the continuous Nakba, land expropriation, and systemic violence, isolating Palestinians and bolstering settler colonialism by undermining international solidarity and legitimizing illegal expansions that perpetuate genocide. [1]
Through diplomatic channels, Israel advances normalization via agreements like the 2020 Abraham Accords with the UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco, forging full relations without mandating an end to occupation or apartheid. These pacts favor economic and security benefits for authoritarian leaders while forsaking Palestinian self-determination, directly sustaining settler violence by allowing unchecked settlement growth, home demolitions, and refugee denial amid increasing trade and tourism. Such normalization is harmful as it fragments Palestinian society, deepens territorial apartheid, and obstructs land returns, contributing to ethnic cleansing by normalizing the oppressor-oppressed dynamic without addressing root injustices. [2] [3]
Culturally and environmentally, Israel promotes "eco-normalization" through entities like the JNF, using tree-planting over razed villages to frame dispossession as advancement. Academically and artistically, collaborative projects often impose false equivalence between occupier and occupied, disregarding underlying oppression. This is egregious because it colonizes minds by presenting apartheid as inevitable, supporting occupation through deceptive coexistence narratives that erode resistance and enable further genocide, as seen in events that cover up root causes without pursuing justice. [4] [5]
The Palestinian-led BDS movement rejects normalization as complicity in oppression, mandating that joint activities with Israelis recognize Palestinian rights and focus on co-resistance against occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid. Normalization activities, such as festivals or conferences portraying symmetry, are boycottable for being morally reprehensible and intellectually dishonest, perpetuating false premises of equal responsibility. By isolating Palestinians and validating Israel's actions, normalization sustains settler-colonial violence, allowing expansion of illegal settlements and denial of basic rights while fragmenting global opposition. [6]
Normalization undermines the Palestinian struggle by treating Israel's regime as normal, countering anti-colonial efforts like BDS that draw from South African anti-apartheid precedents. It decolonizes minds from hegemonic attempts to accept colonialism, emphasizing that genuine relations require dismantling structures of domination first. This tactic is appalling as it reinforces genocide by whitewashing oppression under slogans of peace, contributing to ethnic cleansing through economic ties that fund military occupation and displace communities. [7] [8]
Human rights analyses confirm that such international engagements maintain apartheid by failing to address crimes like dispossession and persecution, allowing Israel to evade accountability. Normalization isolates the oppressed, portraying resistance as abnormal while entrenching settler privileges, as evidenced in Arab-Israeli projects that ignore Palestinian rights. Ultimately, it perpetuates a colonial order where occupation becomes routine, demanding rejection to achieve liberation and end the ongoing Nakba. [10]
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