In February 2024, Coles signed a three-year contract with US defence and surveillance giant Palantir.
The company was co-founded by Peter Thiel – a man who wrote in 2009 that freedom and democracy are ‘no longer compatible’, partly blaming women’s suffrage for this outcome.
Palantir has been heavily involved in Israel’s ongoing war crimes, and crimes against humanity: the genocide in Gaza and the US-Israeli war on Iran has been widely condemned by international law experts as a violation of the UN Charter.
Additionally there was aerial spraying of glyphosate – the herbicide marketed as Roundup – over farmland in southern Lebanon at concentrations up to 30 times normal levels – this was confirmed by UNIFIL and documented by Lebanese government laboratories, and described by human rights monitors as a potential war crime.
Israel’s deliberate destruction of Gaza’s water and sewage infrastructure caused deprivation of water access to 2.3 million people, as documented by Human Rights Watch and the UN.
Palantir has also received over $287 million in contracts from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), with its tools used in deportations, workplace raids and family separations.
I contacted Coles about their Palantir partnership breaching their own code of ethics, but they did not consider war crimes or crimes against humanity to be an ethical concern.
The major Norwegian asset manager Storebrand apparently disagrees – it divested from Palantir, stating it had ‘excluded Palantir Technologies Inc. from our investments owing to its sales of products and services to Israel for use in occupied Palestinian territories.’ (Reuters, 26 October, 2024.)
I will no longer shop at Coles or any store owned by the Coles Group, and hope that anyone who does not support war crimes, crimes against humanity, or the deliberate poisoning of civilian farmland and water supplies may consider doing the same.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
