Blacklisted firms need to pay dearly

The UN has named 206 businesses that profit from Palestinian misery and Israel’s illegal colonies

he government of Israel is one that rules without moral conviction or legitimate jurisdiction over the people and territory it has stolen and now occupied across Palestine. Since 1948 and its inception, Israel has treated all Palestinians with contempt at best, jailing generations of Palestinians for daring to resist the illegal and immoral occupation of their lands, and bringing the might of their military to bear with frightening regularity on a largely unarmed population. And in occupied Jerusalem, Israel has consistently and deliberately encroached upon Palestinian lands, claiming, re-zoning and building on areas of occupied East Jerusalem in the face of concerted international and Palestinian opposition.

The rate of Israeli colonisation in occupied East Jerusalem in particular has increased and shows no let-up as long as the right-wing rabble and rabbis in the Cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hold sway. But the work of Palestinian activists and that of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions movement has proven to be a well-placed thorn in the sides of those businesses and companies who are prepared to sell out their morals for Israeli shekels. Their methodology and logic is simple — if you do business with the occupation administration, you won’t do it elsewhere. And it’s an effective message.

Now, the United Nations human rights office has identified 206 companies that are involved in doing business in Israeli colonies in the West Bank, where it said violations against Palestinians are “pervasive and devastating”. For the companies, being named in the UN database essentially makes them fair game — and rightly so — for targeting by the BDS campaigners.

The majority of the 206 businesses are based in Israel and the colonies. Apart from these 143, 22 more are located in the United States, and the remaining are spread across 19 other countries, the UN says. All of these blacklisted companies have been involved in construction work in the illegal colonies, providing building materials, arranging and organising financing for the new colonists, providing transport links, providing surveillance equipment, and generally profiting from the occupation administration’s seizure and development of Palestinian land and turning it into new colonies.

But as well as naming the 206 companies, the UN went on to cite the harmful restrictions on freedom of religion, movement, education as well as access to land, water and livelihoods caused by Israel’s illegal colonisation policies. Now named, these 206 companies need to be shamed. They must not be allowed to carry on business as usual.