We Are All Complicit

When police officers arrest peaceful protesters, the defence is often: *I was just following orders.* And the counterpoint is equally familiar: there is no excuse for obedience to injustice. That much is true. But there is a harder truth we often avoid because it implicates not just those in uniform, but all of us. The truth is: we are all complicit.

Complicity isn’t confined to batons and handcuffs. It is woven into the everyday systems that sustain our lives. We pay taxes that fund military budgets. We scroll through apps built by companies investing in surveillance and arms. We consume products that travel through supply chains threaded with exploitation. None of us stand outside this web.

Take the NHS, a cherished institution that is supposed to be our sanctuary. And yet its data platform is being built by Palantir, a company whose technology is tied to surveillance and military targeting in Israel and beyond. Do I stop using the NHS? I can’t. My family’s health depends on it. But my reliance still binds me to a company profiting from war.

Or consider Spotify. For most of us it is simply music in the background of our days. But its billionaire co-founder Daniel Ek has invested millions into military technology firms supplying Israel’s assault on Gaza. Even our playlists, it seems, carry the weight of complicity.

And these are only fragments of a larger pattern. Google and Amazon provide AI and cloud infrastructure to the Israeli government under Project Nimbus.[1] Microsoft’s Azure and GPT-4 tools have been integrated into military operations.[2] Caterpillar supplies the bulldozers that demolish Palestinian homes—so notorious that Norway’s $2 trillion sovereign wealth fund recently divested from the company.[3] Defence giants like Lockheed Martin, Leonardo and Elbit Systems profit directly from weapons sales, while global shippers like Maersk keep the cargo flowing.[4] Even the phones in our pockets are assembled from minerals extracted under brutal conditions in global supply chains.

This is not accidental. The system is designed to make purity impossible. It wants us dependent and compromised, so that complicity feels inevitable and resistance feels futile. When every service, every product, every institution is touched by violence, the temptation is to shrug and say: *what difference can my choices make?*

But recognising complicity is not about surrender. It is about clarity. It means refusing the comfort of pointing fingers while pretending our own hands are clean. The question is not *“Am I complicit?”* but *“What am I doing despite my complicity?”*

There are cracks in the system. Some institutions are beginning to take a stand. Scotland has banned public funding for arms companies supplying Israel’s military.[5] Norway has divested from Caterpillar. And workers inside tech firms are organising: Google and Amazon employees have launched the *No Tech for Apartheid* campaign, while Microsoft staff have staged walkouts under the banner *No Azure for Apartheid*.[6] These acts are small, but they remind us that even in a tangled web, it is possible to pull at the knots.

We are all complicit. That is not an excuse to turn away or to accept things as they are. It is the very reason we must act—because if our daily lives are tied to injustice, then our daily acts of resistance matter all the more. Keep questioning the status quo...

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References

[1] “How US Big Tech supports Israel’s AI-powered genocide and apartheid,” Al Jazeera, May 2024.

[2] “Israeli military used Microsoft AI in Gaza war,” The Guardian, Jan 2025.

[3] “Norway’s wealth fund divests from Caterpillar over ethical concerns,” Reuters, Sept 2025.

[4] “Global firms profiting from genocide in Gaza, says UN rapporteur,” The Guardian, July 2025.

[5] “Scotland bans arms companies that supply IDF from receiving financial aid,” The Guardian, Sept 2025.

[6] “No Tech for Apartheid campaign at Google and Amazon,” Wikipedia (accessed Sept 2025)

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