IBM - BDS-1000 Dossier

Key Findings

• Economic: IBM Israel Ltd. has been the primary computing and software vendor to the Israel Police since 1975, with active sole-supplier contracts running through December 2030 (IBM MQ) and January 2031 (IBM DataPower), and its subsidiary Red Hat Israel is described by its own executives as a self-identified “partner” of the IDF.¹²
• Digital: IBM Israel designed and, since 2019, has operated the “Eitan” biometric population registry for Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority (PIBA), a system the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories named as central to Israel’s surveillance apparatus.¹³
• Military: IBM and Red Hat hold a 25-year, roughly $275 million–$1 billion IT services contract (awarded January 2020, shared with Malam Team) covering three IDF regional logistics centres handling combat equipment, and Red Hat’s OpenShift platform underpins the IDF’s “Operational Cloud” since 2017.¹⁴
• Not found: No public evidence identified that IBM supplies weapons platforms, munitions, or military hardware components; IBM does not appear on the OHCHR’s West Bank settlement-business database, and IBM’s own 2021 bid to become a prime Project Nimbus contractor was unsuccessful.⁵⁶

Target Profile

Key Facts:

• Six wholly owned Israeli subsidiaries documented: IBM Israel Ltd.; IBM Information Services Ltd.; IBM Global Services (Israel) Ltd.; IBM Israel Science and Technology Ltd.; I.B.M. Israel Properties Ltd.; and Red Hat Israel Ltd.¹
• Israel R&D footprint traces to 1972 (IBM Israel Scientific Center, Technion, Haifa); more than 3,000 employees reported across Israeli sites as of 2023⁸¹¹
• No public evidence identified that IBM, the parent corporation, was founded in Israel or is headquartered or beneficially controlled there⁷

Executive Summary

IBM’s documented Israel/Palestine nexus is not that of a settlement developer, an arms manufacturer, or a consumer brand caught in a boycott campaign - it is that of a five-decade incumbent information-technology vendor whose wholly owned Israeli subsidiaries occupy structurally important, recurring positions inside Israel’s military, policing, and population-registry infrastructure. The clearest and best-corroborated vector is economic and digital in character: IBM Israel has supplied the Israel Police with core computing and software infrastructure since 1975, a relationship renewed as recently as May 2025 and November 2025 with sole-supplier contracts running to December 2030 and January 2031 respectively, and since 2019 has operated the “Eitan” central database of Israel’s Population, Immigration and Borders Authority (PIBA) - the biometric registry underlying Israel’s permit and movement-control regime over Palestinians.¹²

A second, well-documented vector runs through Red Hat, acquired by IBM in 2019. Red Hat Israel is identified by Who Profits and corroborated by The Intercept as the Israeli military’s largest OpenShift customer, providing the cloud infrastructure backbone - the IDF’s “Operational Cloud” - that has served the Air Force, Ground Forces, Intelligence Directorate, and Navy since 2017, with a Red Hat executive quoted in 2020 stating “we consider ourselves partners of the IDF.”¹⁴ IBM and Red Hat, together with co-contractor Malam Team, hold a 25-year Israeli Ministry of Defense (IMOD) IT services contract (awarded January 2020) covering three regional logistics centres that handle combat equipment, and Red Hat’s OpenShift platform now also underpins Project Nimbus, Israel’s centralised government cloud programme, which contractually extends to defence primes Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.¹⁴⁶¹²

Several allegations examined in the underlying research did not withstand verification and are excluded or carried with explicit caveats rather than treated as findings. A claim that IBM technology underlies the IDF’s “Lavender” AI-targeting system could not be corroborated against primary reporting, which attributes Lavender’s origin to internal Israeli military-intelligence development; it is excluded here as unverified. A reported “skin-tone search” capability in an IBM-linked recognition system rests on a single NGO document that could not be corroborated by a second independent source, and is noted only as an unverified claim, not a finding. No public evidence identified links IBM to Cellebrite, NSO Group, offensive cyber-tool development, or the supply of munitions, weapons platforms, or armour materials to any Israeli defence end-user. IBM does not appear on the OHCHR’s database of businesses linked to West Bank settlements, and its 2021 bid to become a prime Project Nimbus cloud contractor was unsuccessful - the Google/Amazon consortium won that tender, with IBM’s Nimbus exposure arising only later (April 2024) as an indirect, subcontracted linkage via Red Hat’s distributor, Matrix IT.⁵⁶¹

IBM’s public conduct record shows a company that has taken affirmative action on adjacent human-rights concerns elsewhere (ending general-purpose facial-recognition sales in 2020 over surveillance and racial-bias concerns) while declining to apply comparable scrutiny to its own Israel-facing government contracts. CEO Arvind Krishna’s public statements on the 2023–2024 war addressed Israeli and IBM-employee casualties without reference to Palestinian civilians, and in an internal 2024 Q&A he explicitly framed IBM’s posture in Israel and Saudi Arabia alike as customer- and government-driven rather than a matter for independent ethical judgment - a framing that drew internal employee criticism.¹⁰¹³

Taken together, the audits support a Tier B (Severe) classification. The Final V4 Balanced Risk Score of 741 is driven by the Economic domain, which reaches the ceiling value across the four domains (V_MAX = 8.00) on the strength of IBM’s decades-long, renewing, sole-supplier position inside Israeli state security infrastructure and its unwound acquisition trail, while Military (6.50), Digital (6.96), and Political (5.80) each independently document a substantial and continuing - but narrower - nexus.

Timeline of Relevant Events

Corporate Overview

IBM Corporation is a US-incorporated, NYSE-listed multinational with no controlling shareholder; its Israel operations are conducted entirely through wholly owned subsidiaries rather than joint ventures or franchise arrangements. Who Profits documents six such entities: IBM Israel Ltd., IBM Information Services Ltd., IBM Global Services (Israel) Ltd., IBM Israel Science and Technology Ltd., I.B.M. Israel Properties Ltd., and Red Hat Israel Ltd.¹ Red Hat, acquired by IBM in 2019 for approximately $34 billion (transaction value not separately verified within the four domain audits), operates in Israel as a distinct subsidiary whose distributor, Matrix IT Ltd., is described as Red Hat’s longstanding “main distributor” in the country.²¹ IBM’s Israel R&D footprint - described as one of its largest research operations outside the United States - spans Haifa, Tel Aviv, Herzliya, Rehovot, Givatayim, Be’er Sheva, and the Jerusalem Technology Park, with the Haifa Research Lab reported to have been renovated and reopened on the University of Haifa campus in 2024.⁸¹¹ This footprint has been built in substantial part through acquisition of Israeli-founded companies - Ubique (1998), XIV Ltd. (2008), Guardium (2009), Storwize (2010), Worklight (2012), CSL International (2013), Trusteer (2013), EZSource (2016), Cloudigo (2017), Databand.ai (2022), and Polar Security (2023) - all integrated as wholly owned assets into IBM’s global security and cloud product lines rather than held or later divested as standalone entities.^14172215 No public evidence identified of divestment or wind-down of any of these acquired Israeli entities.

Domain Summaries

Military: Military

Mechanism of Involvement

IBM’s military-adjacent presence in Israel operates through two wholly owned subsidiaries acting as long-term IT and cloud-services vendors to Israel’s defence establishment, rather than through arms manufacture. IBM Israel Ltd. has held recurring IMOD server, storage, and computing-centre contracts since at least 2008, culminating in a 25-year regional-logistics-centre IT contract (awarded January 2020, shared with Malam Team) valued by different sources at approximately $275 million (IBM’s share) to roughly NIS 1 billion (total), covering IT infrastructure for combat-equipment logistics.¹⁴ Red Hat Israel, since 2017, has supplied the OpenShift container platform underlying the IDF’s “Operational Cloud,” serving the Air Force, Ground Forces, Intelligence Directorate, and Navy, with Red Hat’s own Israel executive describing the company as a self-identified IDF “partner” and a 2022 Red Hat “Innovation Award” presented to the IDF’s Mamram computing directorate (case-study content later removed from Red Hat’s website in October 2024 following civil-society pressure).¹⁴ IBM also participates in IMOD-linked institutional fora, including the iHLS INNOTECH cyber/homeland-security exhibition and the Israel Innovation Authority committee that runs joint ventures with IMOD.¹ IBM operates a Cyber Security Centre of Excellence at Be’er Sheva’s Gav-Yam park (since 2014, expanded 2018) as part of IMOD’s “Southern Relocation” initiative co-locating tech firms with military cyber units.¹

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

No public evidence identified of IBM acting as prime contractor, licensed manufacturer, or supplier of small arms, artillery, armoured vehicles, drones, naval vessels, munitions, or munitions precursor materials to Israeli or any other defence end-user. Red Hat’s February 2024 “Compress the Kill Cycle” whitepaper describes kill-chain-compression capability chiefly in the context of US Air Force programmes; no confirmed sale or deployment of that specific product to Israeli lethal platforms has been identified. The 2016–2017 Rafael–EMC–IBM consortium bid for an IDF data-centre tender has no confirmed award in public records. IBM’s February 2026 selection for the US Missile Defense Agency’s SHIELD programme is explicitly a US homeland-defence contract with no identified Israeli nexus. IBM’s IMOD and Israel Police contracts are IT-infrastructure and services relationships rather than component-level supply of weapons hardware.

Named Entities and Evidence Map

• IBM Israel Ltd. / Red Hat Israel Ltd. - IMOD server, storage, and logistics-centre IT contracts (2008–2045); Mamram OpenShift “Operational Cloud” (2017–present).¹⁴
• Malam Team - co-contractor on the 2020 25-year IMOD logistics contract; separately operates a West Bank settlement IT facility (Beitar Illit) through its Malam Systems subsidiary, a relationship distinct from the IBM joint venture.¹
• Elbit Systems - joint December 2020 PIBA “E-VISA/Marom” contract with IBM Israel (NIS 18 million).¹
• Arvind Krishna - IBM Chairman/CEO; also a Northrop Grumman board director since November 2022, a governance-level (not transactional) defence-sector linkage.⁹

Digital: Digital

Mechanism of Involvement

IBM’s digital-domain nexus centres on its role as designer and operator of Israel’s biometric population-registry infrastructure. IBM Israel designed and, since 2019, has operated the “Eitan” central database of Israel’s Population, Immigration and Borders Authority (PIBA), originally contracted in 2017 for a reported ~$240 million (~NIS 840 million), with cumulative contract value exceeding NIS 800 million between 2018 and 2021 and operations reportedly extending to 2035; a further 2021 PIBA remote-biometric-identification contract (NIS 5.6 million) and a December 2020 joint IBM–Elbit Systems “Marom” e-visa contract (NIS 18 million) extend this relationship.¹³ The Eitan system records biometric and, per the UN Special Rapporteur, ethnic/religious identity data on Palestinians across Israel and the occupied territories, and administers the permit regime governing Palestinian movement.¹³ IBM has also been the primary computing/software supplier to the Israel Police since 1975, with active sole-supplier contracts for IBM DataPower (to January 2031) and IBM MQ (to December 2030).¹ Separately, IBM has embedded Israeli-founded cybersecurity technology into its core global security products through acquisitions of Trusteer (2013), Cloudigo (2017), and Polar Security (2023).¹⁴¹⁷¹⁵ Red Hat, via distributor Matrix IT, began supplying OpenShift into Israel’s Project Nimbus government-cloud programme from April 2024, an indirect/subcontracted linkage (Red Hat → Matrix → Nimbus) whose confirmed end users include IMOD, the IDF, Israel Police, Israel Prison Service, and defence manufacturers Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael.¹⁶

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

IBM ended general-purpose facial-recognition sales in June 2020, citing surveillance and racial-bias concerns - a policy that Who Profits and Storebrand note stands in tension with, but did not extend to, IBM’s continued operation of Israeli state biometric identity systems.¹¹⁹ No public evidence identified that IBM operates a dedicated local IBM Cloud region in Israel (unlike AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or Oracle), and IBM was not awarded prime-contractor status on Project Nimbus, losing the original 2021 tender to the Google/Amazon consortium.⁶¹² No public evidence identified linking IBM to development or sale of offensive cyber tools, exploit brokering, or an operational relationship with Cellebrite or NSO Group. A claim that IBM technology underlies the IDF’s “Lavender” AI-targeting system could not be corroborated against primary reporting and is excluded as unverified. IBM Watson Health’s only identified Israel-linked AI work (a licensing partnership with MedyMatch for stroke/head-trauma imaging) is civilian and medical. A reported “skin-tone search” capability attributed to an IBM-linked system rests on a single, uncorroborated NGO source and is flagged, not adopted, as a finding.

Named Entities and Evidence Map

• IBM Israel Ltd. - designer/operator of the PIBA “Eitan” biometric registry (2017–2035); Israel Police sole-supplier vendor (1975–2031).¹
• Red Hat Israel Ltd. / Matrix IT Ltd. - OpenShift supply into Project Nimbus (2024–present), serving IMOD, IDF, Israel Police, Israel Prison Service, IAI, Rafael.¹⁶
• UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese (A/HRC/59/23) - names IBM, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft, as central to Israel’s surveillance apparatus.³

Economic: Economic

Mechanism of Involvement

IBM’s economic exposure is that of a long-tenured, recurring state-security vendor rather than a physical-goods trader. IBM Israel’s decades-long, renewing sole-supplier and near-sole-supplier position with the Israel Police (1975–2031) and its PIBA/Eitan contracting (2017–2035) constitute the domain’s strongest evidence, alongside the 2020 25-year IMOD logistics contract.¹ IBM has built substantial, disclosed Israeli acquisition exposure - most notably Trusteer ($800 million–$1 billion, 2013), the company’s largest-ever Israel acquisition - alongside XIV Ltd. ($300–350 million), Guardium ($225 million), Storwize ($140 million), and Polar Security ($60 million), none of which have been divested.¹⁴¹⁷ IBM’s Israel R&D footprint has expanded geographically with dedicated centres in Ashdod (2019, PIBA-focused) and Be’er Sheva (2018).¹ On the capital-structure side, IBM has no controlling parent, and its largest shareholders (Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street) are US-domiciled asset managers; BlackRock’s ~8.6% stake was separately flagged by the UN Special Rapporteur as an investor-linkage data point.⁷³ This economic relationship has continued past the 19 July 2024 ICJ advisory opinion and the November 2024 ICC arrest warrants, with the Israel Police contracts renewed in May and November 2025.¹

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

IBM is an enterprise IT, software, and consulting company with no identified importer-of-record, physical-goods, agricultural, or produce sourcing relationship tied to Israel or the occupied territories, and no public evidence identified of settlement-origin product labeling issues, since IBM sells no relevant consumer goods. IBM does not manufacture physical products requiring country-of-origin compliance analogous to construction, agricultural, or banking companies on the OHCHR settlement-business list, and does not itself appear on that list - unlike its 2020 IMOD contract partner Malam Team.⁵ No public evidence identified that IBM holds Israeli sovereign bonds, underwrites Israeli debt, or otherwise functions as a financial institution with Israel-specific treasury exposure; this category is not applicable to IBM’s business model. IBM’s cooperation with Ariel University (a West Bank settlement institution) is documented only as hosting student-mentoring events in 2019, with no public evidence identified of renewal or discontinuation after that date, leaving its current status unconfirmed.¹ IBM discloses no Israel-specific revenue, profit, or tax figures in SEC filings, which report only aggregated regional (EMEA) totals, limiting quantification of the relationship’s financial scale.¹

Named Entities and Evidence Map

• IBM Israel Ltd. - Israel Police vendor (1975–2031); PIBA/Eitan operator (2017–2035).¹
• Vanguard, BlackRock, State Street - IBM’s largest institutional shareholders; no evidence of Israeli beneficial control.⁷
• Norway’s Storebrand and KLP funds - divested from / excluded IBM (2021, 2024) over settlement and biometrics-related human-rights concerns.¹⁸¹⁹²³

Political: Political

Mechanism of Involvement

IBM’s political-domain exposure is defined chiefly by its corporate communications posture and its named inclusion in UN human-rights reporting, rather than by lobbying or advocacy-financing activity. CEO Arvind Krishna’s October 2023 statement addressed IBM employee/retiree deaths and condemned “acts of terrorism” without reference to Gaza or Palestinian casualties, and in a June 2024 employee Q&A he explicitly declined to render an ethical judgment on IBM’s Israel operations, stating IBM follows what host governments “consider to be correct behavior” - a response employees reportedly found “predictably shameful.”¹⁰¹³ IBM is named at length in UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s July 2025 report (A/HRC/59/23), which states IBM has “operated in Israel since 1972, training military/intelligence personnel - especially from Unit 8200,” and has “operated and upgraded” the PIBA database since 2019.³ IBM is tracked by Who Profits, AFSC’s Investigate database, and the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre’s allegation tracker on this basis, and the BDS Movement has called for the UN “AI for Good” summit to end its IBM partnership.¹⁷ Storebrand’s March 2024 divestment (~$139 million) explicitly cited IBM’s unwillingness to engage in dialogue on the biometrics issue.¹⁸¹⁹

Counter-Arguments and Evidence Limits

NGO Monitor, offered in the underlying research as a counter-source, characterizes the Albanese report as a “highly politicized narrative” that seeks to convert political disputes into legal indictments of private companies without imposing direct international-humanitarian-law obligations on them - a materially opposing interpretive frame that this dossier records without adjudicating.²⁴ No public evidence identified of IBM-specific shareholder resolutions on Israel/Palestine human-rights due diligence (contrasted with resolutions targeting other named defence-sector companies); IBM’s shareholder proposals are general lobbying-transparency measures, not Israel-specific. No public evidence identified connecting an IBM corporate PAC to AIPAC, or of direct corporate donations to FIDF, JNF/KKL, or comparable organizations; IBM’s October 2023 crisis giving was directed at unnamed general humanitarian-relief organizations via employee-donation matching, not military-welfare bodies. No public evidence identified of IBM formally accepting Israeli state honors or naming an explicit “Brand Israel” campaign.

Named Entities and Evidence Map

• Arvind Krishna - sole named executive voice on Israel/Gaza; statements track a customer-driven, non-adjudicative posture.¹⁰¹³
• UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese (A/HRC/59/23) - names IBM among companies central to Israel’s surveillance apparatus.³
• NGO Monitor - disputes the legal and interpretive framing of the Albanese report as applied to private companies.²⁴
• Storebrand / Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions (LO) - divestment action citing IBM’s non-engagement.¹⁸¹⁹

BDS-1000 Score (V4)

• V_MAX: 8.00 Sum_OTHERS: 19.26
• BRS Score: 741 Tier: B (Severe)

Economic sets V_MAX at 8.00, reflecting IBM’s highest Impact (8.0), Magnitude (7.5), and Proximity (8.5) ratings across the four domains - driven by the decades-long, renewing, sole-supplier vendor relationships with the Israel Police and PIBA, and an unwound trail of Israeli acquisitions with no identified divestment. Digital (6.96) and Military (6.50) each independently document a substantial military/surveillance-infrastructure nexus through Red Hat’s IDF cloud role and the Eitan biometric system, while Political (5.80), though the lowest domain score, still reflects a sustained, named presence in UN human-rights reporting and a documented pattern of non-engagement with investor concerns. The resulting BRS of 741 places IBM in Tier B (Severe). The score reflects the scale-free, evidence-only method applied uniformly across the audits: Impact (I) captures activity type, Magnitude (M) captures scale, and Proximity (P) captures directness of the Israel/Palestine linkage, with all four domain scores vetted against verifiable, dated public-record evidence.

Methodology Note

• Every claim in this dossier traces to the four domain audits (Military, Digital, Economic, Political); no additional research was introduced at the drafting stage.
• Scores are scale-free: Impact (I) reflects the type of activity, Magnitude (M) reflects its scale, and Proximity (P) reflects the directness of the Israel/Palestine nexus; the V-Domain Score is a vetted composite of I, M, and P per domain.
• A temporal mitigation rule applies: divested, exited, or unsuccessful (e.g., IBM’s lost 2021 Nimbus prime bid) operations are noted as such and not treated as active nexus points.
• Entity attribution follows a no-transitive-guilt standard: findings are anchored to IBM, IBM Israel Ltd., and Red Hat Israel Ltd. specifically; co-contractor conduct (e.g., Malam Team’s separate West Bank settlement facility) is noted as distinct and not imputed to IBM.
• Where checks found nothing - e.g., IBM appearing on the OHCHR settlement-business database, IBM supplying munitions or weapons platforms, or an IBM–NSO Group/Cellebrite relationship - this dossier states “No public evidence identified” rather than inferring absence of any relationship.
• Claims marked unverified, single-sourced, or unresolved in the underlying audits (e.g., the “Lavender” AI-targeting attribution, the “skin-tone search” claim, the Rafael–EMC–IBM consortium’s contract-award status) are carried with those caveats and are not presented as established findings.

End Notes