“It never rains but it pours” is an expression that we grew up with. In the context of this article it refers to the fact we have recently returned from a 10-day trip to Ramallah in Palestine, during that time hearing and seeing a variety of disturbing events and happenings, and are now suddenly faced with a request for action. As if that wasn’t enough, the request mirrors the repeated requests that we heard whilst we were in Palestine. It could even be interpreted as a test of one’s newly forming convictions – especially as at the time of writing provocative actions on the part of Israel and insults to US policy and international peacemaking efforts are threatening a third intifada (uprising) from the Palestinians.
But before going into detail about the request, a word or two needs to be said about why we were in Ramallah in early March 2010 and some indication given of what we saw and heard. We were there partly because we were representing Quaker Service Sweden on a visit to the Am’ari Play Centre, supported by a number of European Yearly Meetings and currently under the auspices of the European and Middle East Section (EMES) of the Friends World Committee for Consultation (FWCC), and partly to attend the Ramallah Meeting House Centenary celebrations. As a bonus we were invited to attend a three-day Consultation on the future of the Friends International Centre in Ramallah (FICR), organised by the FICR Steering Committee, to assess the work of the Centre since its inception in 2005 and discuss possible future directions.
In terms of what we saw during our time there, the extent of the enormous concrete Wall and its criss-cross carving up of the landscape was a shocking sight. It also seemed incomprehensible why the military-controlled Qalandia checkpoint, blocking the route from Jerusalem to Ramallah, divided two Arab communities. The planned light railway system, designed to facilitate travel to and from the various settlements in and around Jerusalem, will necessitate yet another systematic carve-up of the already disputed territory. We saw Palestinian
homes in the Sheikh Jarrah occupied area of East Jerusalem that had been forcibly taken over by Israelis and met and talked to one of the owners – houses draped over with Israeli flags and decorated with a Menorah (the Jewish candelabra with nine arms) to signal changed ownership and eventual clearance demolition.It is estimated that there are more than 1,500 pending demolition orders in East Jerusalem alone, potentially affecting several thousand Palestinian residents. Even while we were in Ramallah the Israeli Government announced the building of 1,600 new settlements in the sensitive East Jerusalem area in connection with US Vice-President Joe Biden’s visit.
Local people we met – including Quakers – told us about having to have different kinds of ID in order to move around. A lack of the correct kind of ID often means exclusion from health care and other rights. The taxi driver taking us to the airport told us something of his own everyday experiences. such as checking his mobile phone for text messages in a parking area (for which he had paid) at a checkpoint and being fined by Israeli soldiers for not turning off his engine, and on another occasion being asked to get out of his taxi at a checkpoint and promptly being fined for not wearing his seatbelt (which he’d had to remove to get out of the car!). The woman from Bethlehem who provided breakfast at the guest house apologised profusely for being late and keeping us waiting, but explained that she had been delayed in the checkpoints en route to work: “the soldiers take their time and often finish their smokes before dealing with us and then we have to pass individually through the security gate.”
During the FICR Consultation we heard other local and more politically engaged voices, such as that of Mustafa Barghouti, leader of the Palestinian National Initiative and an advocate of non-violent resistance. He was in no doubt whatsoever that the general situation in Palestine was one where the worst kind of human rights violations were taking place, and was of the opinion that Israel was being allowed, by the international community, to be above international law and international norms. His view was that the term peace process was “a misleading concept, a time-wasting nonsense and a cover for Israeli de facto measures on the ground.” He also said that it was the longest occupation in modern history and that Israel was creating the worst system of apartheid. “The Israelis”, Barghouti said, “will only negotiate on the 2005 Sharon Plan.” He maintained too that the only thing that would lead to change would be if Palestinians and the international community spoke out strongly for justice and took strong positions, such as had happened in South Africa. He encouraged us to press for divestment and a boycott of Israeli products. His final message was that the Palestinian’s worst enemy was depression, and that “Hope is most important”.
An Israeli journalist, critical of Israel’s hard policies, also said that Palestinians have had much less freedom since 1994 and that the so-called peace process actually amounts to hypocrisy. The view was that some people on both sides of the Wall, which serves as an effective barrier to change and peace, profit from the occupation and are granted certain privileges and that there is even apartheid in Israel as well as in the occupied territories. There was no longer any belief in a two-state solution. Other local voices indicated that the only solution was one democratic country in which everyone could live regardless of identity and that all those who have been forced to leave had the right to return. “It is a problem for 10.6 million Palestinians around the world, not just those living in the West Bank and Gaza”, one person said. Another indicated that the Palestinian civil society was starting to play a more central role to stop the cycle of occupation – colonisation – apartheid. We heard too about the situation in the South Hebron hills, where people’s land and livelihoods were being forcibly removed by the Israeli military – and that any documentation of this was strictly forbidden. Despite all these injustices, the Palestinians were committed to nonviolent resistance.
We heard from young graduates from the Friends Schools in Ramallah who had completed their education at prestigious universities in the US and were now working for an international programme of Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions – actions that were seen as the only way of bringing due pressure to bear on the Israeli Government to end the occupation. Indeed, the Epistle that resulted from the FICR Consultation, and addressed to Friends everywhere, called Quakers to international solidarity with Palestinian and Israeli efforts “to end the occupation, lift the siege on Gaza and restore human and civil rights through a nonviolent program of boycott, divestment and sanctions” [...] and “consider adopting boycott, divestment and sanctions as we may be led to do, individually or corporately.”
We heard, too, that the Israeli Government controls the distribution of water and electricity in the occupied territories. Some areas find themselves without both for up to three days at a time. The price of water and electricity is also controlled by Israel, with Palestinians having to pay double the price or more for these products and services.
Back, now, to the above-mentioned request, for boycotting and protest action, sent to us via the Quaker Council for European Affairs (QCEA) in Brussels, which was in turn sent to them by a Palestinian NGO visited by members of the QCEA Study Tour in 2009. In short, the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) is calling for a boycott of the Swedish fashion company H&M, particularly in the Arab World, in response to the opening of its second store in Israel, this time in Jerusalem’s “Malha Mall”, at a time when Israel is intensifying its illegal colonisation of the occupied eastern part of the city.[1] By way of explanation, Malha is one of the Palestinian villages that was ethnically cleansed during the 1948 Nakba and whose original Palestinian inhabitants are refugees who have been denied their UN-sanctioned right to return to their lands.
Besides opening stores in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, H&M has announced plans to open additional stores in Haifa, Petah Tikva, Netanya, and Rehovot and thereby invest substantially in Israel – in the midst of its continued aggression towards Gaza and an intensified colonisation of Jerusalem. This, states the BDS National Committee, “can only be understood by Palestinians and supporters of just peace around the world as a form of support for Israel’s abhorrent violations of international law and human rights.” In turn, H&M claims to adhere to the UN Global Compact[2], a corporate social responsibility initiative that obliges it to ensure it has nothing to do with human rights abuses. Indeed, the UN’s Goldstone report has recently condemned Israel for not only committing grave human rights abuses but also war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during its Gaza massacre. By ignoring this and investing heavily in Israel's economy, H&M is regarded as violating its own commitments to the UN’s principles of ethical investment.
In the information sent to us the call was for solidarity organisations and people of conscience around the world, particularly in Arab states, to escalate their civil protests against H&M and achieve a total boycott of the chain until it has ended its complicity in Israel's system of occupation, colonisation and apartheid against the Palestinian people. One of the arguments used is that that conducting business as usual with Israel is not only unethical; it is also detrimental to the pursuit of a just peace based on international law.
In enlightening us about this issue, QCEA asked whether this was something that Quakers in Sweden Yearly Meeting could pick up on. Initial approaches have led to somewhat negative responses – which in effect has led to the writing of this article and a deeper exploration of the issues. It also begs the question of whether boycotting and sanctions are futile actions for a small group of Friends and whether other ways of ‘speaking truth to power’ are more appropriate – and if so, what these might be.
With the local Palestinian voices encouraging boycott action still ringing in our ears, we decided to explore the matter of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel further and see what the global BDS movement has achieved so far. Starting with Sweden and other Scandinavian countries, it appears that serious measures have been taken in recent years to exclude companies implicated in Israel’s occupation and illegal building of colonies and the Wall from their pension funds. For example, according to The Ethical Council’s 2009 Annual Report, the four Swedish AP Funds divested from the Israeli company Elbit Systems Ltd in the first quarter of 2010. The large Danske Bank also divested from Elbit Systems Ltd and other Israeli companies involved in systematic human rights violations. In September 2009 the Norwegian Government excluded Elbit Systems Ltd from the Government Pension Fund, Global, on the basis of recommendations from the Council on Ethics’ following their discovery that investment in Elbit constituted a serious risk of contributing to violations of fundamental ethical norms as a result of Israel’s construction of a separate barrier on occupied territory.
Outside Scandinavia, in countries like Britain, France and Canada, trades unions have actively calling for a commitment to a boycott of Israeli goods and divestment and sanctions against Israel. Pension funds in the Netherlands and the USA have followed Norway’s move to divest. The Church of England also announced its divestment from Caterpillar in 2009 – a company whose bulldozers and heavy plant equipment have been used to destroy Palestinian homes by the Israeli military. Important initiatives for academic boycotts have also been launched, e.g. by universities in the US, Spain, the UK, Norway, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, France and South Africa, to name but a few. Cultural boycott actions have also been encouraged, such as Amnesty International’s withdrawal of support for a Leonard Cohen concert held in Israel and the campaign and protest against the Toronto International Film Festival’s special tribute to Tel Aviv in an attempt to rebrand Israel in a positive light following the atrocities committed in the 2008-2009 war on Gaza. More information about individual campaigns can be accessed on the Global BDS Movement website: http://bdsmovement.net/
To return to the question posed by QCEA as to whether some kind of action against H&M could be taken by Swedish Quakers as a corporate body, it is clear that Friends in Sweden need to grapple with the issues involved and arrive at some kind of decision. In this, one very big challenge will be whether or not to ignore the calls made by the Palestinian civil society to people of conscience all over the world to put pressure on states and companies to impose boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa during the apartheid era. There seems to be no doubt that Israel has created a complicated system of apartheid in the occupied territories – something we saw with our own eyes and heard about with our own ears when there in March. Israel is also continuing to evict Palestinians from their homes, replace them with Jewish colonial settlers and construct tens of thousands of housing units for those settlers in the occupied Palestinian territory. Indeed, all Israeli colonies are regarded as war crimes under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
It is not only a question of boycotting H&M, though. Many other companies are also involved and expanding in Israel. The thing is, do we ignore the local Palestinian calls for such action and instead seek other ways of ‘speaking truth to power’? If the latter, what are these ways and how do we go about it? How have other Quaker groups tackled similar questions and, if so, what actions have they agreed on? Turning our corporate back and doing nothing does not seem to be a viable option.
© Sue Glover Frykman
[1] See H&M Whitewashing Israel's Colonization of Jerusalem on http://bdsmovement.net/
[2] See http://www.unglobalcompact.org/ for more detailed information about this.
