Cummins has published another warm little newsroom cuddle with Komatsu, announcing that the two industrial giants have strengthened their “shared commitment to communities”.
Lovely.
Nothing says community quite like an excavator.
Nothing says partnership quite like a joint corporate statement about helping people while one partner’s machinery has been documented demolishing their homes.
On 20 July 2026, Cummins presented its relationship with Komatsu as a force for good in the places where both companies operate. A month earlier, The Guardian reported that it had geolocated and verified images of Komatsu excavators being used by the Israeli military to destroy homes, public utilities, shops and other structures across southern Lebanon.
So let us take a moment to admire the timing.
One company writes about communities. The other company’s machines turn up in verified images helping erase them.
Corporate responsibility, apparently, is just geography with better lighting.
The Community At The Other End Of The Bucket
The Cummins article speaks the usual international language of polished hands and clean intentions. Communities. Opportunity. Partnership. The sort of words designed to make a global manufacturer look like a kindly neighbour who happens to own several factories and an expensive communications department.
Southern Lebanon offers a more physical definition of community.
A home. A shop. A water system. Solar panels. A road. A family’s ability to return after displacement. The dull, ordinary infrastructure that stops human beings from becoming a before-and-after photograph in somebody else’s foreign-policy disaster.
The Guardian reported that photographs taken in Mays al-Jabal showed Komatsu excavators among flattened houses and actively demolishing homes. Its reporting said that videos from other Lebanese border towns showed foreign-made excavators being used against homes and infrastructure.
Human Rights Watch has warned that wide-scale destruction of villages in southern Lebanon could amount to wanton destruction, a war crime.
This is not a fucking branding issue.
It is not an unfortunate product-placement mishap at a trade show.
These are machines built by a company Cummins has chosen to celebrate as a community partner, appearing in a documented campaign of destruction against actual communities.
That should make the word stick in the throat a little.
Komatsu’s “We Can’t Control It” Routine
Komatsu’s reported response is the familiar industrial shrug.
The company said it has internal human-rights policies but limited ability to control what customers do with products once they have been sold to dealers.
That is a very convenient place to end responsibility: the precise moment the invoice clears.
Komatsu’s own human-rights materials tell a more ambitious story. The company says it operates downstream human-rights due diligence, has a “responsible sales” approach and works to identify, prevent and mitigate abuses connected to its products and business relationships.
Excellent. So this is not a company that has never heard of downstream risk.
It is not a bloke selling a second-hand shovel from the back of a van, blinking into the sunlight and wondering where it ended up.
Komatsu has a global compliance structure, human-rights training, grievance mechanisms, supplier assessments and a published commitment to responsible sales. It knows the risks exist. It says it has systems designed to identify them.
Then its machines appear in verified images tearing through homes in southern Lebanon, and the answer becomes: sorry, mate, difficult to control after the sale.
That is not due diligence. That is a fire extinguisher kept behind glass with a note saying: “For emergencies, please contact marketing”.
Communities Are Not A PowerPoint Slide
Cummins and Komatsu have been doing this corporate-responsibility dance for years. They talk about technical education, opportunity and helping places flourish.
There is nothing wrong with funding skills programmes. There is nothing wrong with investing in schools or communities. Those things matter.
However, the word community cannot only mean a classroom with branded hard hats and a photographer in the corner.
It must also mean the Lebanese village at the other end of the Komatsu excavator.
Otherwise, it is just a fucking mood board.
A community is not strengthened because two multinational companies publish a cheerful article about it. It is strengthened when people can live in it, work in it, access water in it and return home without finding the landscape scraped flat by machinery supplied through somebody’s sales network.
Perhaps Cummins and Komatsu should add that to the next partnership deck.
Slide one: empowering communities through education.
Slide two: please do not look at the excavators.
Cummins Does Not Get To Borrow The Halo
Cummins did not manufacture the excavators in southern Lebanon. It is not alleged to have operated them or supplied them to the Israeli military.
That is not the point.
Cummins chose to publish a fresh celebration of its relationship with Komatsu under the banner of a shared commitment to communities. It voluntarily wrapped itself in the language of ethical partnership, social impact and collective responsibility.
You do not get to borrow the halo and then complain when somebody checks where the light is coming from.
A company that wants applause for its partners’ values also inherits some very reasonable questions when those values collide with verified reporting from a war zone.
What does Cummins’ commitment to communities require of a partner whose machinery has been documented destroying communities?
Does the partnership have any human-rights expectations beyond the nice parts of the annual report?
Has Cummins asked Komatsu what safeguards it has in place to prevent its products being used this way?
Or is the whole arrangement just two industrial giants exchanging compliments over a buffet table while the uncomfortable shit gets pushed behind the curtain?
This Is Not A New Problem
TCAP has already written about Komatsu’s record, including its Russia withdrawal theatre, safety issues and other controversies.
This, though, is current.
The Guardian’s report was published on 17 June 2026. Cummins’ new community-commitment article arrived on 20 July 2026.
That is not ancient history excavated from a dusty archive. It is a fresh corporate press release walking straight into a live ethical problem with its eyes open and its trousers around its ankles.
Komatsu can say it lacks control once equipment reaches dealers. Cummins can say its partnership is about social impact. Both companies can issue statements in fonts designed to soothe investors and charm graduates at recruitment fairs.
The images remain.
Komatsu excavators. Destroyed homes. Southern Lebanon.
No amount of community-outreach copy can sandblast that away.
The Simple Test
Here is the test for every line Cummins and Komatsu now write about “communities”.
Would they say it to someone standing beside the remains of their home in Mays al-Jabal?
Would they explain that the companies share a commitment to opportunity, education and improving lives while a Komatsu excavator works through the rubble behind them?
Perhaps they would they mention responsible sales?
Would they call it a regrettable complexity of global business?
Or would they finally admit that corporate responsibility means fuck all when it ends at the point of sale?
Cummins and Komatsu have strengthened their shared commitment to communities.
The communities in southern Lebanon may reasonably ask what, exactly, that commitment looks like from underneath a fucking excavator.
Lee Thompson – Founder, The Cummins Accountability Project
Sources
- Cummins and Komatsu strengthen shared commitment to communities
- Construction equipment multinationals may be aiding Israeli war crimes, experts say
- Business and human rights
- Lebanon: Israel unlawfully destroying reconstruction equipment
- Profiting off Russia’s war machine: Pull-out PR won’t wash the blood away
- From the ashes of a fuck-up: The real deal on Komatsu