Get your business out of the oPt says Human Rights Watch

Palestinians protest near the Rami Levy supermarket in the Sha’ar Binyamin industrial zone in the West Bank. They call for a boycott of settlement goods. Photo by Muhannad Alazzeh/Twitter

Human Rights Watch calls on businesses to cease Israeli settlement-related activities

The HRW report documents how settlement businesses benefit at the expense of Palestinians

By David Palumbo-Liu, Salon
January 20, 2016

Human Rights Watch calls on businesses to cease Israeli settlement-related activities

Most moral and ethical people would recoil from the idea of profiting from someone else’s pain and suffering. How much more objectionable is it, then, when one is profiting from ongoing, systemic violations of human rights?

In its new 162-page report, “Occupation Inc.: How Settlement Businesses Contribute to Israel’s Violations of Palestinian Rights,” the human rights group Human Rights Watch documents how settlement businesses facilitate the growth and operations of settlements. HRW explains,

These businesses depend on and contribute to the Israeli authorities’ unlawful confiscation of Palestinian land and other resources. They also benefit from these violations, as well as Israel’s discriminatory policies that provide privileges to settlements at the expense of Palestinians, such as access to land and water, government subsidies, and permits for developing land.

The report

calls for businesses to stop operating in, financing, servicing or trading with Israeli settlements in order to comply with their human rights responsibilities. Those activities contribute to and benefit from an inherently unlawful and abusive system that violates the rights of Palestinians.

What is critical to bear in mind is that these activities amount to theft as well—the benefits of Palestinian land, resources and labour are being reaped by these companies, not by the Palestinians themselves. This is wage theft on a massive, collective scale, and the Palestinians are clearly not in the position to bear any more losses of critical resources. They are a population situated at the heart of despair. Their slow death is, of course, something the Israeli state has no problem in accommodating, if not facilitating.

Its horrific 2008 thought experiment, pondering how many calories are necessary to maintain a Palestinian life at bare minimum, is one example of this mind-set. Human rights groups vociferously protested the plan and it was never carried out. What we see in the settlements now with regard to these companies is both an economic mode of starvation, and, worse, a greedy profiting from that suffering.

Most important, HRW notes that

the report comes at a time when economic pressure on Israel to end its settlement activity is gaining momentum. It has the potential to exert effective pressure on businesses to cease their settlement-related activities, because it makes a law-based, rights-based argument likely to resonate with corporations and their stakeholders: companies simply cannot continue to do business in or with settlements without violating their human rights responsibilities.

Indeed, the recent decision of the Westpath Investment Group to take on the beliefs and commitments of the United Methodist Church with regard to investments reveals a growing consensus to invest only in companies that observe human rights law and specific social principles:

The General Board’s Human Rights guideline reflects The United Methodist Church’s call for all general boards and agencies to “…make a conscious effort to invest in institutions, companies, corporations, or funds whose practices are consistent with the goals outlined in the Social Principles.”

I called on Sarah Saadoun, an Israel/Palestine researcher at Human Rights Watch, and asked her to explain the importance of this report. Why is this something to pay attention to in this particular historical moment?

Can you say something for the average American reader–why is this report important to those in the U.S.?

American businesses are directly involved in Israeli settlement activities. The report highlights the case of RE/MAX, a Colorado-based global real estate franchise that has a branch in the settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. Its branches inside Israel also rent and sell properties in settlements. In doing so, RE/MAX is not only helping to facilitate unlawful settlements, it’s profiting from homes built on land that Israel confiscated in violation of international humanitarian law. Even though the benefit of this land rightfully belongs to Palestinian residents of the West Bank, they cannot enter settlements without an Israeli-issued permit, let alone rent or buy property there. American businesses also purchase and sell goods produced in settlements, in breach of their human rights responsibilities, which applies throughout a company’s supply chain.

A RE-MAX property board in Jerusalem. The Colorado-based real estate firm has no qualms about its role in the property market in illegal settlements.

The report also highlights states’ duty under international law not to treat settlement goods imported into their territory as though they are Israeli-made. U.S. customs regulations dating from 1995 require products made in the West Bank and Gaza to be labelled as such, and prohibits them from being labelled “Made in Israel.” Yet these regulations are not being enforced to require the accurate labeling of settlement products.

What broader issues are involved? How is this part of something larger and extremely deadly?

The report highlights two sides of an abusive coin. On the one hand, settlement businesses benefit Israeli policies that encourage the growth of settlements and the settlement economy by providing financial incentives and granting them access to building permits and licenses to extract natural resources. On the other, it imposes severe restrictions on Area C of the West Bank, which contains most of the open land and natural resources crucial to economic development. For example, between 2000 and 2012, Israel’s Civil Administration rejected 94 percent of Palestinian building requests in Area C; in 2014, it granted one single such permit. According to the Palestine Union of Stone and Marble, Israel has not issued a single license to a Palestinian to open a new quarry since 1994. The World Bank estimated in 2013 that the cost of Israeli restrictions in Area C to the Palestinian economy is $3.4 billion annually.

This is an inversion of what is required under the laws of occupation, which requires that the resources in occupied territory be used solely for the benefit of the native population or for military necessity. Instead, Israel allocates the vast majority of the resources under its control in Area C to Israeli settlers, who should not be there in the first place, and severely restricts Palestinian access to them.

Why now? How do you see the present moment?

Human Rights Watch has been investigating, writing about and advocating against violations of international humanitarian law and human rights abuses associated with settlements for years. In 2010, HRW released a report, Separate and Unequal, which described the two-tiered system of laws, policies, and practices in the West Bank that privileges settlers and harshly discriminates against Palestinians. This report builds on those findings to describe the ways in which businesses contribute to and benefit from this unlawful and abusive system in contravention of their human rights responsibilities.

Barkan industrial Park, West Bank

The report also comes at a time when recognition of the problems associated with doing businesses in or with settlements is gaining momentum. It has the potential to exert effective pressure on businesses to cease their settlement-related activities, because it makes a law-based, rights-based argument likely to resonate with corporations and their stakeholders: Companies simply cannot continue to do business in or with settlements without violating their human rights responsibilities. Indeed, in the process of writing the report, one of the companies we researched relocated, and just this week, the French telecom giant Orange ended its relationship with the Israeli company Partner after being criticized for supporting settlement infrastructure. A few days ago, a major American pension fund announced it would divest from the five major Israeli banks, because of their activities in the settlements.

What kinds of misperceptions or misrepresentations would you like to call attention to?

Human Rights Watch is not calling for a consumer boycott of settlement companies and it does not have a position on the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement — or boycott movements more generally. We are rather calling on businesses to comply with their own human rights responsibilities by ceasing settlement-related activities.

What else is important to emphasize? What kinds of myths need to be addressed?

The most common defence of settlement businesses is that they benefit Palestinians by providing them with jobs. The report aims to describe the broader context within which settlement businesses operate, and the ways in which businesses contribute to and benefit from Israeli policies that leave Palestinians with no better alternative.

The report also describes the legal gray zone in which Palestinians employed in settlements work, leaving them vulnerable to abusive conditions. For companies who are operating under privileged circumstances that Palestinians could never even hope for — and indeed cause grave harm to Palestinians and their economy — to justify their presence in unlawful settlements because they employ Palestinians is to add insult to injury. If these employers truly cared about the financial wellbeing of Palestinians, they should be lobbying their own government to lift its discriminatory restrictions and end its settlement policies.

Waste water management firm AST is, as it says, ‘an Israeli company specializing in smart water treatment solutions’. HQ in Haifa, its actual Operation Facility is in the Shahak industrial park in the West Bank.

Should companies pull their business from Israeli West Bank settlements?

A Jan. 19 Human Rights Watch report states that companies doing business in Israeli settlements are infringing on the human rights of Palestinians in the region, and suggests that the firms involved leave their operations behind.

By Ben Thompson, staff, Christian Science Monitor
January 20, 2016

A new human rights report suggests that companies involved with Israel’s West Bank settlements are contributing to the violation of the human rights of Palestinians living in the region.

The nonprofit, non-governmental activist organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) released its overview of how businesses play into Israel’s infringement of international rules of occupation, citing the Fourth Geneva Convention and the 1907 Hague regulations, and the Jewish state’s violation of international human rights law.

The report states that Israel unlawfully transferred its citizens to an occupied territory, the West Bank, and in doing so displaced members of the existing population there. It also says that Israel unlawfully took resources from the West Bank for its settlements, and discriminates against Palestinians living in areas under Israeli rule.

Titled “Occupation, Inc.: How Settlement Businesses Contribute to Israel’s Violations of Palestinian Rights,” the report suggests that by operating in Israeli settlements or by engaging with settlement businesses, companies are contributing to these human rights abuses.

The report comes as the Palestinian-backed Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which urges consumers to stay away from companies and products that support or are involved in the violation of Palestinian rights, is growing worldwide. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, last year decried the BDS movement as an attack on Jews, likening it to Nazi boycotts in the 1930s.

While Netanyahu has not made a statement about HRW’s report, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs commented on the release on Tuesday.

“At a time when Israel and the international community are taking practical steps to bolster the Palestinian economy and increase Palestinian employment, Israel is concerned with this one-sided, politicized report, which jeopardizes the livelihoods of thousands of Palestinians and discourages rare examples of coexistence, coordination and cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians,” the Ministry said, per The Times of Israel.

Israel first declared its independence in the area in 1948, but has remained at odds with neighbouring Arab states and Palestinian territories since then. Although claimed by the State of Palestine – along with the Gaza Strip and a portion of eastern Jerusalem – the West Bank remains contentiously occupied by Israel, which continues to build settlements across the region in opposition to international law.

The new HRW report invokes the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights in saying that businesses must “Seek to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to their operations, products or services by their business relationships, even if they have not contributed to those impacts.”

Human Rights Watch goes on to say that in the face of Israel’s activities, all companies doing business in relation to the Israeli settlements in the West Bank region “should cease carrying out activities inside or for the benefit of settlements … They should also stop financing, administering, trading with, or otherwise supporting settlements or settlement-related activities and infrastructure.”

“The only things companies can do to maintain their human rights responsibilities is to pull out,” Sari Bashi, HRW’s Israel/Palestine Director, told Time.

“I think that’s a powerful statement, because over the past many years compliance with human rights responsibilities has increased,” she said. “Consumers and shareholders have demanded it.”

Although HRW strongly advocates for the cessation of settlement-related business activity in its report, it does not advise consumers to take any overt action on the issue. While advising that “consumers should have the information they need, such as where products are from, to make informed decisions,” the agency states that instead of a boycott, it is necessary for the companies to follow through with their own burdens of upholding human rights.

The HRW report was released one day after both European and American leadership conveyed ongoing worries about Israel’s handling of its West Bank settlements. The European Union (EU) Foreign Affairs Council held a meeting Monday in which it stated: “The EU reiterates its strong opposition to Israel’s settlement policy and actions taken in this context” and that “It urges Israel to end all settlement activity and to dismantle the outposts erected since March 2001.”

The Council also reported that “All agreements between the State of Israel and the EU must unequivocally and explicitly indicate their inapplicability to the territories occupied by Israel in 1967.”

On Monday the US ambassador to Israel, Daniel B. Shapiro, said that Washington is “concerned and perplexed” by Israel’s ongoing settlement programmes and its treatment of Palestinians under the Jewish state’s laws in the West Bank, according to The Associated Press.

“Too much Israeli vigilantism in the West Bank goes on unchecked,” Shapiro said at an Institute for National Security Studies conference in Tel Aviv.

“At times, it seems Israel has two standards of adherence to rule of law in the West Bank – one for Israelis and one for Palestinians,” he said.