BDS – COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE

_{^{An Israeli army battle tank moves along the border between southern Israel and the Gaza Strip on January 31, 2024. (Jack Guez / AFP via Getty Images)}}

It’s not just defense contractors—many U.S.-based companies are profiting from business with Israel, directly or indirectly enabling the Israeli state’s crimes against Palestinians.

_{Reposted in Dollars and Sense}

Since it began in mid-October of last year, Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza has claimed the lives of 29,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of whom are civilians—including 19,000 women and children. Israeli government ministers have made statements that strongly suggest they are aiming at the ethnic cleansing of the entire population of the Gaza Strip, and South Africa brought genocide charges against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which ruled on January 26 that Israel may be in violation of the United Nations’ Genocide Convention and ordered it to immediately cease violations, including its killing of Palestinians.

Meanwhile, despite increasing evidence of Israeli war crimes, the U.S. government has offered unconditional support to the offensive, apart from perfunctory pleas that Israel exercise “restraint” and respect human rights. The Biden administration has requested $14.3 billion in military aid for Israel from Congress, on top of the roughly $3.8 billion in aid the United States already sends annually.

That aid has been held up in Congress; but in December 2023, President Joe Biden twice circumvented the legislature to sell weapons to Israel, with a total value exceeding $200 million. All this is taking place in the context of decades of occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, a proliferating and increasingly violent settler movement that continues to displace Palestinians, and what Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other human rights organizations have described as a system of apartheid.

The long-standing Israeli occupation and the current war on Gaza is big business for many U.S.-based defense contractors. But beyond military suppliers, many U.S. corporations have substantial investments in Israel. These companies are also complicit in Israel’s human rights abuses—and as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has long recognized, putting pressure on these companies may be crucial to changing Israeli policy.

The Defense Racket

The U.S. corporations with the most direct complicity in Israeli crimes, of course, are military contractors. According to Molly Gott and Derek Seidman, writing for the investigative news website Eyes on the Ties, five of the six biggest weapons manufacturers in the world are based in the United States. Those are Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, General Dynamics, and RTX (formerly known as Raytheon).

Disturbingly, but unsurprisingly, many of these companies saw their stock prices shoot up when Israel’s war on Gaza began, Gott and Seidman reported. And weapons company executives have been publicly enthusiastic about the opportunities for profit opened up by the war. Discussing the conflict on an earnings call on October 24, RTX CEO Greg Hayes declared, “I think really across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking.” On General Dynamics’s earnings call the following day, the company’s CFO and Executive Vice President Jason Aiken said, “If you look at the incremental demand potential coming out of that, the biggest one to highlight and that really sticks out is probably on the artillery side.”

There can be little doubt that Israeli forces are using these weapons to commit war crimes against Palestinians. As Stephen Semler reported in Jacobin, many of the specific weapons that the Biden administration has sent to Israel have been repeatedly used to commit war crimes in the past. This includes Hellfire missiles, artillery shells, and assault rifles that have been used to kill clearly identified civilians. It also includes white phosphorus, which Semler describes as “a brutal incendiary weapon capable of burning straight through flesh, bone, and even metal” that is outlawed for use near civilians by Protocol III of the Geneva Conventions. Israel has used white phosphorus repeatedly, including in the current war.

Profiting From War, Occupation, and Apartheid

Looking beyond weapons companies and their investors, plenty of other U.S. corporations are profiting from the brutal assault on Gaza and the Israeli occupation and apartheid more generally.

The BDS movement is targeting a number of international corporations for consumer boycott campaigns, which are “carefully selected due to the company’s proven record of complicity in Israeli apartheid,” according to a statement on the BDS website. Among the companies based in the United States are Hewlett-Packard (and its enterprise and government services spin-off Hewlett-Packard Enterprises), Chevron, and real estate company RE/MAX.

Hewlett-Packard provides computer hardware and other technology to the Israeli military, police, and government offices. Hewlett-Packard Enterprises provides servers for the country’s Immigration and Population Authority, which BDS says Israel uses “to control and enforce its system of racial segregation and apartheid against Palestinian citizens of Israel.” Energy giant Chevron, meanwhile, extracts gas claimed by Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean; according to BDS, it provides the Israeli state with billions of dollars in revenue in gas licensing payments. In addition, according to BDS, Chevron is:

implicated in Israel’s illegal transfer of extracted fossil gas to Egypt through a pipeline illegally crossing the Palestinian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) in Gaza, owing Palestinians millions in transit fees. It is also potentially complicit in Israeli pillage of Palestinian gas reserves offshore the occupied Gaza Strip, a war crime under international law.

In 2017, SOMO, an Amsterdam think tank that investigates multinational corporations, produced an extensive report on Noble Energy’s involvement in the violation of Palestinian rights connected to its extraction of gas in the Eastern Mediterranean—the company was acquired by Chevron in 2020. In addition to participating in illegally blocking the Palestinian Authority’s access to its small gas reserves off the coast of Gaza via collaboration with Israel’s navy, SOMO reports that its extraction activities in Israeli gas fields could be draining Palestinian gas reserves as well.

“By failing to make efforts to assure Palestinian consent to gas extraction from [Israeli gas fields contiguous with Palestinian gas reserves],” SOMO concluded, “Noble Energy has failed to comply with the OECD Guidelines [for Multinational Enterprises] and [the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights] and conduct appropriate human rights due diligence to identify and prevent potential adverse human rights impacts.” Their report continues:

The company has also potentially contributed to a violation of the collective right of self-determination. Furthermore, if Palestinian natural gas was indeed drained . . . it could be argued that Noble Energy participated in an act of pillage, in violation of international humanitarian and criminal law.

RE/MAX markets and sells property on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are widely viewed as illegal under international law. The Israeli settler movement has long committed violent attacks against Palestinians, often with the implicit or explicit blessing of the Israeli armed forces. It has only grown bolder and more violent since the start of the war. Other U.S. corporations that do business in Israel and have been singled out by BDS for divestment or other forms of pressure campaigns (though not complete boycotts) include Intel, Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Airbnb, Expedia, McDonald’s, Burger King, and Papa John’s.

Following the example of other successful boycott and divestment campaigns, BDS selects only a handful of companies as targets in order to maximize the impact of its campaigns. But these companies are only the tip of the iceberg. The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) maintains a more comprehensive list of companies complicit in various aspects of Israeli occupation and apartheid. Plenty of U.S.-based corporations are, no surprise, to be found on their list as well.

Leaving aside weapons suppliers, among the other prominent and particularly egregious offenders is Caterpillar Inc., the construction machinery and equipment manufacturer, whose D9 armored bulldozer is frequently used by the Israeli military. Israel has deployed Caterpillar D9s to destroy Palestinian homes, schools, and other buildings in the occupied territories, as well as in attacks on Gaza that kill civilians. In 2003, U.S. activist Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by one of these bulldozers “as she attempted to defend a Palestinian home from being demolished while the family was still inside,” according to the AFSC.

ExxonMobil Corporation and Valero, not to be outdone by Chevron’s violations of human rights, provide fuel for the Israeli aircraft that have been relentlessly bombarding Gaza for the past few months. Motorola Solution Inc., the communications and surveillance company, has long provided the surveillance technology that Israel uses to monitor Palestinians in illegal West Bank settlements and at separation walls and checkpoints in Gaza and the West Bank. Travel and tourism company TripAdvisor, meanwhile, is involved in the occupation in a more mundane way: like Airbnb, its websites frequently list and act as booking agents for properties in illegal settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights.

Overall, according to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, in 2022 the United States exported $20 billion worth of goods and services to Israel, accounting for 13.3% of the latter’s total imports. Israel in turn exported $30.6 billion to the United States, with that figure amounting to 18.6% of all Israeli exports. U.S. trade with and investments in Israel play a significant role in Israel’s economy, constituting a potentially powerful source of leverage on the Israeli state.

The Importance of Economic Boycotts

The BDS movement is partly inspired by the decades-long anti-apartheid boycotts against South Africa’s system of apartheid. The boycotts began when African National Congress leader Albert Luthuli called for them in 1958, and the U.K.-based Boycott Movement (later the Anti-Apartheid Movement) was founded the next year. It initially called for a boycott of South African goods, but expanded to demand total disinvestment from and economic sanctions on South Africa.

Eventually, the international pressure created by the Anti-Apartheid Movement helped bring an end to South African apartheid. The hope of BDS supporters is that a similar movement might one day help bring about an end to Israel’s oppression of Palestine.

Right now, the prospects for ending Israeli occupation and apartheid anytime soon look quite dim. The immediate demand that advocates for Palestine are pushing in the United States is a permanent cease-fire in Israel’s devastating attack on Gaza; some activists have also been protesting and attempting to disrupt U.S. weapons sales to Israel. In the long run, though, achieving justice in Palestine will likely require pressuring our own government, and the many U.S. companies who are currently complicit in Israeli crimes, to change course.

_{^{SOURCES: Tia Goldenberg, “Harsh Israeli rhetoric against Palestinians becomes central to South Africa’s genocide case,” AP News, Jan. 18, 2024 (apnews.com); Nicole Narea, “The US may be flouting its own laws by sending unrestricted aid to Israel,” Vox, Dec. 22, 2023 (vox.com); “State Department circumvents Congress, approves $106 million sale of tank ammo to Israel,” CBS News, Dec. 9, 2023 (cbsnews.com); Li Zhou, “The argument that Israel practices apartheid, explained,” Vox, Oct. 20, 2023 (vox.com); Carolina S. Pedrazzi, “In the West Bank, Israel’s Apartheid Rule Results in Everyday Violence,” Jacobin, Oct. 7, 2023 (jacobin.com); In These Times editors, “What You Need to Know About BDS,” In These Times, Nov. 19, 2020 (inthesetimes.com); Molly Gott and Derek Seidman, “Corporate Enablers of Israel’s War on Gaza,” Eyes on the Prize, Oct. 26, 2023 (littlesis.org); Oded Yaron and Ben Samuels, “Revealed: The Munitions U.S. Supplied Israel for Gaza War,” Haaretz, Nov. 16, 2023 (haaretz.com); Ken Klippenstein, “Leaked List of Weapons the U.S. Secretly Sent Israel,” Nov. 15, 2023 (kenklippenstein.com); Andrew Perez, Nick Byron Campbell, Joel Warner, and Lucy Dean Stockton, “‘The Israel Situation Is Going To Put Upward Pressure On Demand,’” The Lever, Oct. 25, 2023 (levernews.com); Stephen Semler, “US Weapons Shipments to Israel Are Enabling War Crimes,” Jacobin, Nov. 22, 2023 (jacobin.com); Palestinian BDS National Committee, “Act Now Against These Companies Profiting from the Genocide of the Palestinian People,” BDS Movement, Jan. 5, 2024 (bdsmovement.net); Zack Beauchamp, “What are settlements, and why are they such a big deal?” Vox, Nov. 9, 2023 (vox.com); Mustafa, Luna, Mariam, Ghassan Najjar, and Sabri, “Dispatches From the West Bank,” Jewish Currents, Oct. 20, 2023 (jewishcurrents.org); “Occupations,” Investigate, A Project of the American Friends Service Committee (investigate.afsc.org); Israel Country Data, International Monetary Fund, October 2023 (imf.org); “Israel,” Office of the United States Trade Representative (ustr.gov); Chris McGreal, “Boycotts and sanctions helped rid South Africa of apartheid—is Israel next in line?” The Guardian, May 23, 2021 (theguardian.com); “The Boycott Movement,” Forward to Freedom (aamarchives.org); Josh Marcus, “Protesters target weapons manufacturers supplying Israel-Hamas war,” The Independent, December 1, 2023 (independent.co.uk); SOMO, Beneath troubled waters: Noble Energy’s exploitation of natural gas in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, May 2017 (somo.nl); Mike Corder and Raf Casert, “Top UN court orders Israel to prevent genocide in Gaza but stops short of ordering cease-fire,” AP News, Jan. 26, 2024 (apnews.com). WTO Trade Profiles 2023: Israel, World Trade Organization (wto.org); Annual Summary of Foreign Investments and Investment Treaties 2022: FDI trends, policy, and developments in investment and trade agreements, Israeli Ministry of Finance (www.gov.li).}}

_{NICK FRENCH is an associate editor at Jacobin magazine.}

_{^{Roboteam, a Maryland-based firm that builds combat robots for the IDF, exhibits one of its weapons systems. (Bill O’Leary / Washington Post via Getty Images)}}

_{Reposted from Jacobin}

Pro-Palestine activists have been working to disrupt arms manufacturers and other companies enabling Israel’s assault on Gaza. Plenty of those suppliers are also raking in profits selling to US law enforcement and private consumers.

Since the start of the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza, antiwar activists have been disrupting the administrative offices, production facilities, and transportation hubs of various weapons manufacturers feeding the Israeli war machine. Targets have included the international branches of Israeli weapons manufacturers like Elbit and multinational corporations that sell to the Israel Defense Force, such as BAE.

As sprawling as those supply chains may be, working up them yields limited opportunities, and activists are largely bound by geography. But it is also possible for activists to work back down the supply chain — not from suppliers to the IDF, but from those suppliers to their other customers.

“These are indeed a secondary market to the trade in heavy weapons that are used to carpet bomb the Gaza Strip and kill thousands of civilians,” says Omar Barghouti, cofounder of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which advocates nonviolent opposition to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. “But secondary or not, they are important.”

Journalist Sylvain Cypel notes in The State of Israel vs. the Jews that Israel is the eighth-largest exporter of weapons in the world. The United States may be number one, but relative to each country’s respective gross domestic product, Israel sells proportionally four times more weapons than the United States, making the Israeli economy more dependent on those sales worldwide.

Due to few regulatory constraints on the industry by the Israeli government, the operations of weapons manufacturers are also more dispersed geographically. For example, Cypel identifies Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, and Elbit Systems as three of the most prominent Israeli weapons manufacturers — all of which have US subsidiaries. According to the National Defense Industry Association, Rafael USA is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland; IAI North America in Herndon, Virginia; and Elbit Systems of America in Arlington, Virginia. In turn, there are further subsidiaries and suppliers to Rafael, IAI, and Elbit across the country.

Another manifestation of Israel’s lax regulation of its weapons industry is consumer sales. While some Israeli weapons manufacturers, like Elbit, focus on selling to governments or businesses, others hawk their wares to anyone with disposable income, especially in the United States.

Isayeret is a somewhat dated but nevertheless revealing online guide for Israeli conscripts. It hosts lists of suppliers of weapons to the IDF (e.g., SIG Sauer, which has an office in Exeter, New Hampshire; Glock in Smyrna, Georgia; Colt in Hartford, Connecticut), optics (Trijicon in Wixom, Michigan; Leupold in Beaverton, Oregon), and more (specifics are hidden behind a paywall).

Isayeret also features Israeli weapons manufacturers that market to consumers. Some, like Rockville, Maryland–based Roboteam, which produces the IDF’s robots, and Stearns, Kentucky–based Fibrotex, which provides its camouflage, market their wares publicly but only sell to militaries and law enforcement. Others, like Marom Dolphin, which produces the IDF’s tactical vests and bulletproof plates, ship to consumers in the United States from Israel.

Many such manufacturers have US retailers. Israel Weapon Industries (IWI) manufactures small arms, such as submachine guns, assault rifles, and light machine guns, for the IDF. Its US subsidiary is based in Middletown, Pennsylvania, and has distributors throughout the United States. IWI shares its base with Meprolight, the primary provider of weapon sights for the IDF, and also has dealers around the country.

Agilite provides vests and bulletproof-plate carriers to the IDF. It has a US fulfillment center in Traverse City, Michigan, and dealers across the US. ACS manufactures grenade and ammunition holsters for the IDF; it does not appear to have a US base but does have distributors in Kansas and Florida.

These Israeli weapons manufacturers also have their own suppliers in the United States. For example, Isayeret lists a US company, Crye Precision, as a point of comparison for Israeli competitors, but the Brooklyn-based textile manufacturer provides camouflage material to Agilite — meaning it’s at best one step removed from the IDF.

These companies’ business in the US helps enable the ongoing Israeli assault on Gaza as well as the Israeli occupation of Palestine in general. IWI illustrates the point well, as Barghouti explains. In Palestine, IWI weapons are being issued to the IDF for their ground operations in Gaza and to paramilitary settlers in the West Bank to drive Palestinians from their homes. At the same time, the company is profiting from sales of guns to both police and private citizens in the United States.

“All these companies are promoting their gear by highlighting the use of this gear by the Israeli military forces,” says Barghouti, “thereby profiting from their complicity and by testing the weapons on Palestinian civilians, in the West Bank as well as in Gaza.”

“Because those in power are arming, funding and otherwise enabling Israel’s system of oppression, Palestinian civil society has called for a global citizens’ response of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice, and equality,” Bhargouti continues. It seems that supporters of the Palestinian cause around the world are increasingly heeding that call — and the vast presence of Israeli arms manufacturers and their partners across the United States gives allies of Palestine here plenty more opportunities to do so.

_{Arvind Dilawar is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Newsweek, the Guardian, Al Jazeera, and elsewhere.}