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In occupied East Jerusalem, repression and forced displacement are daily realities, enacted through a multitude of Israeli state mechanisms working in tandem to drive Palestinians out of their city and crush resistance to Israel’s settler-colonial project. In addition to overt and direct violence – exemplified by home demolitions, policing, surveillance, and regular assaults and arrests – Israel also deploys less visible, albeit equally repressive tactics of control, rooted in what can be termed bureaucratic violence. 

Bureaucracy is often framed as a mechanism to enhance institutional and organizational efficiency in the service of wider society, but as this study by Who Profits shows, bureaucracy can also function as a means of organizing a broad assemblage of processes to achieve political interests. In this update, Who Profits sheds light on Israel’s weaponization of bureaucratic processes to advance its long-standing agendas of illegal settlement expansion and Judaization, while at the same time controlling, concentrating and minimizing the Palestinian presence in Jerusalem. In this update we examine corporate complicity in two prime “bureaucratic-cum-displacement” processes explicitly targeting Palestinians in East Jerusalem – the revocation of the permanent residency status of Palestinian-Jerusalemites and the land registration proceedings, known as the Settlement of Land Title initiated in 2018. 

In both cases, Palestinian Jerusalemites must “prove” their right to reside in their city, as well as prove ownership of their properties to the occupying power through bureaucratic registration processes that are inherently convoluted, vague and costly. These processes are facilitated by the complicity of private corporations contracted by Israeli authorities and are presented in this report through the involvement of four such corporations: Moran Investigations, Tshuva Hakirut and Bitichut Enosh in the residency-related procedures, and Geoda in the land registration procedure.