Tag: Veolia

Palestinian Freedom Riders to ride settler buses to Jerusalem

13 November 2011 | Freedom Riders

Palestine Freedom Riders
Palestine Freedom Riders

Inspired by the Freedom Rides of the US Civil Rights Movement Palestinian activists will attempt to board segregated Israeli settler buses to occupied East Jerusalem

Groups of Palestinian Freedom Riders will attempt to board segregated settler buses heading to Jerusalem through the occupied West Bank this Tuesday November 15, in an act of civil disobedience that takes its inspiration from the US Civil Rights Movement Freedom Riders aim to challenge Israel’s apartheid policies, the ban on Palestinians’ access to Jerusalem, and the overall segregated reality created by a military and settler occupation that is the cornerstone of Israel’s colonial regime. While parallels exist between occupied Palestine and the segregated U.S. South in terms of the underlying racism and the humiliating treatment suffered then by blacks and now by Palestinians, there are also significant differences. In the 1960s U.S. South, black people had to sit in the back of the bus; in occupied Palestine, Palestinians are not even allowed ON the bus nor on the roads that the buses travel on, which are built on stolen Palestinian land.

In undertaking this action Palestinians do not seek the desegregation of settler buses, as the presence of these colonizers and the infrastructure that serves them is illegal and must be dismantled. As part of their struggle for freedom, justice and dignity, Palestinians demand the ability to be able to travel freely on their own roads, on their own land, including the right to travel to Jerusalem.

Palestinian activists also aim to expose two of the companies that profit from Israel’s apartheid policies and encourage global boycott of and divestment from them. The Israeli Egged and French Veolia bus companies operate dozens of segregated lines that run through the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, many of them subsidized by the state. Both companies are also involved in the Jerusalem Light Rail, a train project that links illegal settlements in East Jerusalem to the western part of the city. By facilitating population transfer into occupied Palestinian territory, Egged and Veolia are actively and knowingly complicit in Israel’s settlement enterprise, which the International Court of Justice has determined to be a breach of international law, and particularly Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibiting an occupying power from transferring part of its population into occupied territory.

This Tuesday, Palestinian Freedom Riders will head to Jewish-only bus stops in the West Bank and attempt to board the settler buses. Palestinians understand that this act of nonviolent disobedience may result in violent attacks and even death at the hands of Israeli settlers that are to Israel what the Klu Klux Klan was to the Jim Crow South, or the authorities that protect them. Nonetheless, the Freedom Riders believe that this act of civil resistance is necessary to draw the attention of the world to the immorality of Israel’s occupation and apartheid system as well as to compel justice-loving people to take a stand and divest from Egged, Veolia, and all companies that enable and profit from it.

The Freedom Riders will be joined by activists from all around the world who will stage activities in their cities that highlight the systematic oppression of Palestinians and the need to divest from Egged and Veolia.

For inquiries send an email to palestinianfreedomriders@gmail.com

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Background

The buses that the Freedom Riders will be boarding are operated by the Egged, the largest Israeli public transportation company, and by the French transnational company Veolia. Both companies are complicit in Israel’s violations of international law due to their involvement in and profiting from Israeli’s illegal settlement infrastructure. Palestinian Freedom Riders endorse the call for boycotting both companies, as well as all others involved in Israel’s violations of human rights and international law.[1]

In July 2011, an Egged subsidiary won a public tender to run bus services in the Waterland region of the Netherlands, north of Amsterdam. The company makes money from trampling on the rights of Palestinians and has been a target of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign, which is endorsed by an overwhelming majority of Palestinian civil society. The Freedom Riders call on the people of the Netherlands to sever all dealings with companies, like Egged, involved in human rights violations.

Veolia, has been a target of an international divestment campaign or running bus lines through the West Bank connecting settlements to Jerusalem and for its involvement in the Jerusalem Light Rail which connects Israel’s illegal settlements in and around occupied East Jerusalem to the western part of the city, thereby directly servicing the settlement enterprise.[2]

Over 42 percent of Palestinian land in the West Bank has been taken over for the building of Jewish settlements and their associated regime[3] (including the wall which was declared illegal by the International Court of Justice in 2004), depriving local communities of access to their water resources as well as agricultural lands. Settling Israelis in the occupied Palestinian territory constitutes a war crime according to the Fourth Geneva Convention[4] and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.[5]

The occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip constitute only 22 percent of the Palestinian homeland from which over 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948 when the state of Israel was created. Since then, Palestinian refugees have been languishing in refugee camps and other places of exile, denied the right to return to their homes.

[1] Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS, available at: http://www.bdsmovement.net/call.

[2] http://www.bigcampaign.org/veolia/

[3] B’tselem Report: “By Hook and By Crook, Israeli Settlement Policy in the West Bank,” July 2010; summary available at: http://www.btselem.org/publications/summaries/201007_by_hook_and_by_crook.

[4] See “Israel’s settlement policy is a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention,” The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Gaza, highlighting the relevant articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention to support the determination that settlements are a war crime, at http://www.pchrgaza.org/Intifada/Settlements.conv.htm; see also “Demolitions, new settlements in East Jerusalem could amount to war crimes – UN expert,” UN News Centre, June 29, 2010, at http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=35175&Cr=Palestin&Cr1.

[5] Article 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court prohibits “[t]he transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”

Solidarity with the Palestinian Freedom Riders

10 November 2011 | Jewish Voice for Peace

On November 15th, Palestinian activists will attempt to board segregated Israeli settler public transport headed to occupied East Jerusalem in an act of civil disobedience inspired by the Freedom Riders of the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Fifty years after the U.S. Freedom Riders staged mixed-race bus rides through the roads of the segregated American South, Palestinian Freedom Riders will be asserting their right for liberty and dignity by disrupting the military regime of the Occupation through peaceful civil disobedience. Organizers say that this ride to demand liberty, equality, and access to Jerusalem is the first of many to come. The Freedom Riders will be riding Egged and Veolia buses. Veolia runs many transportation services in local US communities, and is the target of many BDS campaigns. This provides a great opportunity for local Boycott or Dump Veolia campaigns to have a creative action that ties directly to Palestinian-led direct action.

Palestinian Freedom Riders are asking US activists to step up alongside them, taking to the streets (or buses!) to show our solidarity with these courageous and historic protests.

Learn more about separate and unequal transportation systems here.

The resources on this webpage outlines some easy ways to organize solidarity actions in your local community. If you have any questions or would like some support planning, please be in touch! Email: stefanie@jvp.org

Resources for Solidarity:

Click on image to download the toolkit for acting in solidarity with the November 2011 Freedom Rides campaign inspired by those of the Civil Rights Movement.
Click on image to download a high-res copy of the Freedom Rider Cartoon. Cartoon by Ethan Heitner.
Click on icon to listen to an mp3 recording of the Freedom Riders song. Lyrics are available in the toolkit.

Plea to boycott firms with Israel link

Abbas Al Lawati | Gulf News

17 November 2009

Group urges GCC states to shun Alstom and Veolia involved in Occupied Jerusalem projects

Dubai: A pressure campaign targeted at Gulf states was launched in Occupied Jerusalem on Monday by a coalition of 170 Palestinian organisations urging Arab states to boycott companies complicit in Israel’s expansion in the holy city.

In a rare public pressure campaign, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Palestine, a grouping of Palestinian civil society organisations, has turned its focus on the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), which is preparing to build a multi-billion dollar railway to link its six members.

The BDS campaign has called on the GCC and its member states to shun French transport giants Alstom and Veolia, both of which are involved in the construction of the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR), an Israeli project that is expected to link the eastern and western parts of Occupied Jerusalem as well as Jewish colonies on the West Bank.

Critics say the JLR will hinder Palestinian aspirations to have occupied East Jerusalem as a capital of a future Palestinian state.

Unaware

The BDS campaign has proven successful in Europe, where companies have excluded the two transport companies from tenders and divested from them, leading to a loss of $7 billion (Dh25.69 billion) to $8 billion in opportunity cost, according to campaigners.

“Despite these important achievements in the West, no Arab state, especially in the Gulf, has to date excluded Alstom or Veolia from bidding for their public contracts,” read a press release issued by the movement yesterday.

The two companies are now facing a lawsuit in France filed by Palestine Liberation Organisation and French advocacy group Association France-Palestine Solidarité for their activities in Occupied Jerusalem.

Diplomacy

Alstom has expressed enthusiasm about participating in forthcoming Gulf rail projects, estimated to be worth $25 billion.

“We are certainly going to be participating in all tenders in the GCC for transport and power,” said Sylvan Hijazi, country president for Alstom Gulf. “We are proud to contribute and build the future of the Gulf.”

Activists are hoping that Gulf states could use their financial prowess to pressure the two companies to abandon the JLR, thus crippling the already troubled project.

The BDS movement has resorted to a public campaign targeted at Gulf states after apparently failing at a behind-the-scenes pressure campaign with the region’s governments.

Jamal Jum’a of the Stop the Wall, part of the BDS movement, said that the BDS movement sent a number of letters to Gulf governments asking them to withhold contracts from the two French companies which were “met with silence”.

Jum’a however insisted that the public campaign was not an attempt to shame Gulf states or “prove any kind of Arab conspiracy against [occupied] Jerusalem”.

“There’s a strong possibility that Gulf states are unaware of the work Alstom and Veolia are doing in occupied Jerusalem. It is unacceptable that Arab states don’t take a stand on this.”

Alain Gresh, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in Paris, said that the political climate was right for Gulf states to apply pressure on Israel.

“It is the right moment to show clearly to Israel that the continuation of the occupation policy has a price, and not only a political price but even an economic price,” he said.

“I can’t say if the Gulf states will do it. The political climate is right especially after the Gaza [war] and the Goldstone report. Public opinion in Europe is that we can’t let the [status quo] continue. If the [Gulf states] take a strong position now it will have an effect not only on Israel but also on Western positions on Israel.”

He said however that Israel being a “legal entity” meant that European companies could not legally apply a blanket boycott on the state, but the two companies could legitimately withdraw based on the argument that the project is being built on occupied territory. “This can be defended in any court,” he said.

Were the companies to withdraw, he added, they would likely attribute the decision publicly to reasons other than occupation, “but everybody will understand”.

Gulf News did not receive a response from Veolia by the time of going to print.

Palestinian-led movement to boycott Israel is gaining support

Gal Beckerman | Forward

16 September 2009

Uzbekistan-born diamond mogul Lev Leviev announced late in August that his company, Africa-Israel, was drowning in debt of more than $5.5 billion that it could not repay. Over the next two days, shares in the company’s stock plummeted by more than one-third. It was relentless bad news for one of the world’s richest men. His holding and investment company had lost $1.4 billion since 2008, mostly due to failed real estate investments in the United States.

Watching Leviev’s precipitous downfall from the sidelines were pro-Palestinian activists. And they were cheering.

Though certainly not the cause of his financial collapse, for the past two years, these activists have singled out Leviev as one of their high-profile villains for his large contributions to West Bank settlements. And they have been effective gadflies. Several of the company’s major shareholders have divested their holdings from Africa-Israel after receiving complaints from clients. And at least two charities have declared publicly they will not accept Leviev’s contributions.

The pro-Palestinian activists are affiliated with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, an international coalition with the goal of isolating and discomfiting Israel just as South Africa’s apartheid regime was targeted in the 1980s.

Initiated by Palestinian groups in 2005 but strengthened by a network that takes in dozens of leftist organizations in Europe and the United States, the Global BDS Movement claims a number of recent successes. Especially in the wake of the Gaza incursion of last winter, groups associated with the boycott have now felt spurred to expand their efforts into even the sensitive realm of academic and cultural boycotts of Israel.

As Omar Barghouti, one of the Palestinian leaders of the BDS movement, told the Forward, “Our South Africa moment has finally arrived.”

Some major Jewish groups acknowledge BDS as a possible threat. “There are clearly a number of episodes building up here that would allow advocates of a boycott to say that slowly, slowly we are achieving what we want, which is the South Africanization of Israel,” said American Jewish Committee spokesman Ben Cohen. “I’m not sure that the increase in activity is quite as dramatic as some people would believe, but it’s clear to me that this discourse of boycott is being increasingly legitimized, and it would appear that some companies are responsive to it.”

The BDS movement is highly decentralized, with each group in the coalition allowed to choose its own targets as it sees fit. It has no articulated political vision. such as a one- or two-state solution to the conflict. The principles that guide the movement — as set out in a call for boycott, divestment and sanctions issued in June 2005 by a wide group of Palestinian civil society organizations — demand instead that Israel adhere to international and human rights law. The amorphous structure and broad goals appear to be responsible for many of the group’s appeal. But some who watch this movement closely contend that, in the end, even a “targetted” boycott is ultimately aimed at all of Israel.

The actual monetary impact of the movement is often unclear. But for activists seeking as much to affect Israel’s image in the public’s mind, money is not always the bottom line.

The campaign against Leviev is a good example. It was initiated by Adalah-NY, one of the handful of American groups in the BDS movement’s network. It was Adalah’s activists who chose to focus on Leviev’s construction projects in the West Bank and on contributions he has made to the Land Redemption Fund, which gives money for settlement development. Adalah-NY protesters first picketed the opening two years ago of Leviev’s diamond retail store, yelling at actress Susan Sarandon as she entered the Madison Avenue shop. Since then, the group has taken every opportunity to point out his connections to the West Bank settlements.

Lately, the fruits of this focus on Leviev have been piling up. On Sept. 11 TIAA-CREF, the giant pension fund, announced that it had divested from Africa-Israel last March after 59 of the company’s investors accused it of being “a company which violates human rights and international law.” UNICEF and OXFAM denied Leviev’s public claims to have given them generous contributions and added that they would not accept contributions from him because of his financial support for West Bank settlements. Also, in the past few weeks, a couple of Africa-Israel’s largest investors have sold their stock in Leviev’s company after receiving pressure from their clients. Most notable was BlackRock, the British subsidiary of the major Wall Street banking firm, which announced that it was divesting following concerns expressed by three client Scandinavian banks.

“Those aren’t small things,” said Andrew Kadi, a member of Adalah who is involved with the Leviev campaign. “People don’t completely grasp how serious it is when two of your top 10 or 12 shareholders divest. We’re talking about millions of dollars.”

Neither Leviev nor Africa-Israel responded to requests for comment.

Leviev’s trouble is just one of many recent signs of the movement’s higher profile. There was the protest joined by several celebrities in mid-September at the Toronto International Film Festival of the festival’s official cultural partnership with the city of Tel Aviv in celebration of the latter’s 100th anniversary. A few days earlier, Neve Gordon, a professor at Ben-Gurion University, wrote a controversial opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times, endorsing the BDS movement as the “only way to counter the apartheid trend in Israel.” This past June, the French company Veolia Environnement SA abandoned its multibillion-dollar project to build a light rail train system in Jerusalem after pressure mounted in France from BDS-affiliated groups. The activists counted it as one more victory.

Ironically, Barghouti, who appears to be one of the movement’s chief strategists, is currently in a master’s degree program in philosophy at Tel Aviv University — even though he is one of the founding members of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. He has been one of the activists strongly pushing the greater BDS movement in the direction of opposing any institution associated with Israel.

Asked about his affiliation with an institution he wants boycotted, Barghouti declined to discuss his personal life.

In an e-mail to the Forward, Barghouti emphasized that the BDS movement “does not adopt a particular political solution to the colonial conflict.” The main strategy, he wrote, “is based on the principle that human rights and international law must be upheld and respected no matter what the political solution may be. This was key to securing a near consensus in Palestinian civil society and a wide network of support around the world, including the Western mainstream.”

The exclusive focus on rights rather than on a political prescription for the conflict brings together both those who want to target Israel’s existence as a whole and those—mostly American activists—who stick to the more narrow issue of the occupation and settlement activity.

As far as Barghouti is concerned, BDS is a “comprehensive boycott of Israel, including all its products, academic and cultural institutions, etc.” But he understands “the tactical needs of our partners to carry out a selective boycott of settlement products, say, or military suppliers of the Israeli occupation army as the easiest way to rally support around as a black-and-white violation of international law and basic human rights.”

Cohen, the AJC spokesman, views this tactic as a transparent deception. “If you probe these groups a little deeper, you’ll find that really this is entirely ideologically motivated. They are just a bunch of radical groups that want to see the state of Israel eliminated,” he said. “That is the thread that unites all the disparate groups in the BDS movement, they all see BDS as a means to arrive at the goal of a world without Israel. I think that many people who might be troubled by Israel’s presence in the West Bank are going to run a mile when they see what the real agenda of these groups are.”

The activist group Code Pink: Women for Peace recently turned its attention to this type of targeted boycott, focusing on the cosmetics company Ahava. Based in the kibbutz Mitzpe Shalem, a settlement in the West Bank, Ahava was a convenient target for the group. After picketing stores that sold Ahava products — mostly mud masks and mineral salts from the Dead Sea — the Code Pink activists looked on with satisfaction as the company’s spokeswoman, “Sex and the City” star Kristin Davis, was dropped as an ambassador for OXFAM. The group gave its reasons in a statement, saying that it “remains opposed to settlement trade, in which Ahava is engaged.”

Nancy Kricorian, Code Pink’s New York City coordinator and the organizer of its Ahava campaign, dubbed Stolen Beauty, said that this push against the cosmetics company was effective precisely because it was tightly focused on a settlement operation. And yet, it also fell squarely within the guidelines of the BDS movement’s principles and objectives and was even cited by Barghouti as a successful model because it sullied Ahava’s name publicly.

Barghouti, Kricorian and other BDS activists attended the national conference of the U.S. Campaign to the End the Israeli Occupation, which took place on September 12 and 13 in Chicago. The organization is itself an amalgamation of dozens of smaller pro-Palestinian groups from across the country. Up until this conference, its BDS activity had also been narrowly focused on American companies involved in the West Bank. Specifically, they have targeted Caterpillar Inc. for manufacturing the bulldozers involved in settlement construction, and Motorola USA for the surveillance and communications equipment used by the Israeli army.

But according to David Hosey, national media coordinator for the campaign, the group resolved at the conference to extend its activities for the first time to the more sensitive cultural and academic boycott. Like many other pro-Palestinian activists, Hosey dated this willingness to increase boycott activity to the Gaza incursion of this past winter.

“It was a big shock to the system, and it caused a big sea change in what people were willing to do,” said Rebecca Vilkomerson, the national director of Jewish Voice for Peace, which, though supportive of the BDS movement, has not officially joined it.

Contact Gal Beckerman at beckerman@forward.com

Derailing injustice: Palestinian civil resistance to the “Jerusalem Light Rail”

Omar Barghoutti | Jerusalem Quarterly

25 August 2009

“I believe that this [Jerusalem Light Rail] should be done, and in any event, anything that can be done to strengthen Jerusalem, construct it, expand it and sustain it for eternity as the capital of the Jewish people and the united capital of the State of Israel, should be done.”
Ariel Sharon, August 2005

Introduction

“Swimming against the tide” is regarded by many cultures, including Arab culture, as unwise, if not altogether irrational and desperately futile; swimming against the tide and hoping to reach your desired destination would, then, defy common sense and call into question one’s sanity. Taking this defiance to a new level, the Palestinian civil society campaign for Boycott, Divestment

and Sanctions (BDS)1 and its international supporters in the solidarity movement have been contributing to resisting Israel’s multi-faceted oppression against the indigenous people of Palestine by mobilizing international civil society to apply effective, nonviolent and sustained pressure against it until it fully complies with its obligations under international law and respects Palestinian rights.

The campaign against the “Jerusalem Light Rail” is a case in point, that tellingly illustrates the potency and potential of such a struggle as well as the challenges stacked up against it.

Realizing Herzl’s Vision

According to its official brochure,2 the Jerusalem Light Rail, JLR, is intended to fulfill Theodore Herzl’s vision of Jerusalem: “modern neighborhoods with electric lines, tree-lined boulevards… a metropolis of the 20th century.” The other crucial element of Herzl’s Eurocentric vision for the entire land of Palestine as a Jewish state was even more faithfully adhered to by the project planners.

Thus, while the professed goals of the JLR cite typical urban planning priorities, such as relieving traffic congestion and renewal of the city center, the actual map of the JLR’s planned route and stations reveal the unspoken underlying objective of the project: to irreversibly entrench the “Judaization” of Jerusalem3 and perpetuate its current reality as a unified city with a predominantly Jewish population under Israeli control. By connecting its most significant colonies, or “settlement blocs,” illegally built on the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) including East Jerusalem,4 in contravention of international law,5 Israel hopes to use the JLR – as part of a comprehensive, long-term strategy that includes the Wall and other repressive measures6 – to cement the integration of those blocs into an ever sprawling “Greater Jerusalem,” thereby creating the third most important fact on the ground, after the 1948 nakba7 with the mass forcible displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians that accompanied it and the 1967 military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

The political and legal implications of the JLR cannot be fully appreciated unless seen within the context of Israel’s strategic plans for Jerusalem, particularly the “secret plan”8 sponsored by the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office and Mayor of Jerusalem to “strengthen Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel.” This plan, exposed recently in Haaretz, aims at creating Israeli “hegemony” over the area around the Old City, “inspired by extreme right-wing ideology.” A recent Palestinian position paper9 on the JLR states that, “The overarching policy framework for Jerusalem is illustrated most fully by the Master Plan 2020 document (2004), which outlines measures to prevent the growth of Palestinian communities and encourage the growth of Jewish settlements, with the goal of creating a 70:30 ratio of Jews to Palestinians, as stipulated by government decisions. Doing this involves ethnically cleansing Palestinian communities from Jerusalem through a variety of mechanisms, including the Wall and the revocation of identity papers.”

The JLR is the brainchild of the Jerusalem Transportation Master Plan, jointly administered by the Ministry of Transport and the Jerusalem Municipality. Its strategic role in Israel’s colonial plans for Jerusalem stems from the fact that it purports to treat the burgeoning inadequacy of the existing Israeli road and mass transit system in accommodating the fast rising needs associated with the uncontrolled growth of Israel’s illegal colonies in the occupied territory, especially since the signature of the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1993, a period that has witnessed almost a doubling of the population of Jewish settlers in the OPT. As the official route of the JLR reveals,10 the tram’s various routes will predominantly intended to serve Israel’s illegal colonies in or surrounding occupied East Jerusalem, such as: Atarot Airport, Neve Ya’kov, Pisgat Ze’ev, Ramot, Har Ha-Tzofim Campus of the Hebrew University and Gilo, among others.

Perpetuating Injustice: The Legal Case against the JLR

Based on the Fourth Geneva Convention, numerous UN resolutions have condemned as illegal Israel’s colonies (settlements) that are built on what is internationally recognized to be occupied Palestinian land. The most recent reaffirmation of this verdict of international law came from the International Court of Justice, which on 9th July 2004 issued its advisory opinion against Israel’s Wall and colonies built in the OPT,11 a ruling that is widely recognized as nothing less than a legal and political watershed in the Palestinian struggle against Israel’s occupation. Infrastructure and other projects that serve these colonies or act in any way to perpetuate their existence are, by extension, illegal. Not only does the JLR significantly contribute to Israeli designs to make its illegal annexation of occupied Palestinian territory irreversible; it also provides the colonies with a crucial service, connecting them to Israel. Accordingly, the JLR is considered an integral part of Israel’s illegal colonial regime and, therefore, a violation of international law that may amount to a war crime. Companies that participate in building and running the JLR or in constructing, maintaining and servicing Israeli colonies,12 more generally, can therefore be regarded as “aiding and abetting” these crimes.

Furthermore, citing the Hague Convention IV on Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, 18 October 1907, the PLO’s Negotiation Support Unit argues:13

“As an occupant, Israel has no sovereign rights or title to the OPT, including East Jerusalem. Consequently, it may only undertake changes in East Jerusalem and the rest of the OPT for the benefit of the occupied Palestinian population or for military necessity. As the Light Rail neither caters to the needs of Palestinian civilians nor serves any genuine military purpose, the Light Rail constitutes an illegal change to East Jerusalem and neighbouring West Bank areas.”

The above furnished the legal basis of a lawsuit in France against Veolia and Alstom, two of the constituent companies involved in the consortium that signed the contract with the State of Israel to build and manage the JLR project. Both companies are French conglomerates involved in vast projects in dozens of countries around the world, mostly focusing on, inter alia, transportation, water and sanitation. The unprecedented case, presented before the court of Nanterre by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Association France-Palestine Solidarité (AFPS) in 2007,14 while still being deliberated, has made enough progress to inspire similar action elsewhere against companies implicated in the JLR project. In April of this year, already, the High Court of Nanterre, France (Tribunal de Grande Instance de Nanterre), according to an AFPS press statement,15 has thwarted relentless efforts by Veolia and Alstom to have the case dismissed by declaring that it has jurisdiction to hear the legal claim brought by AFPS against the companies regarding the construction and operation of a light railway in East Jerusalem. Moreover, in response to a claim by Veolia and Alstom that the French court lacks jurisdiction in this case, based on the fact that the state of Israel enjoys sovereign immunity from being sued in foreign courts, the Nanterre court ruled that:

“[A]part from the fact that the State of Israel is not party to this action, this state could not seriously have standing in relation to disputed contracts in the guise of a sovereign state since this state is in fact an occupying power of the area in the West Bank where the light rail system is being built and where its exploitation is contentious, an area recognized by the international community and the International Court of Justice as being part of the Palestinian territory.”

In the United Kingdom, for instance, Daniel Machover, a prominent attorney and cofounder of Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, has adopted an innovative legal approach to challenge Veolia and other companies in its category. Machover invoked the UK 2006 Public Procurement Regulations, which is the British implementing measure of EU Directive 2004/18/EC16 to argue that a local authority may be subjected to legal challenge if it does not agree to exclude Veolia as an economic operator from a public bid. Specifically, he bases his case on Article 45 of the EU Directive, which includes the provision that any economic operator “may be excluded from participation in a contract” if it “has been guilty of grave professional misconduct proven by any means which the contracting authorities can demonstrate,” among others clauses.

Machover argues that this type of discretionary decision by a public body in the UK can be subjected to a legal challenge in the High Court. It is expected that, presented with hard evidence of Veolia’s “grave professional misconduct,” coupled with substantial public pressure, and a credible threat of High Court involvement, local authorities may opt to exclude Veolia to avoid the trouble. If this approach yields positive results, it is likely to be emulated across EU states, where the same laws apply.
Palestinian Civil Society Fights Back

Despite the ICJ’s unambiguous ruling on the Wall and settlements, no serious efforts were exerted by the Palestinian leadership, the Arab League, the UN, the EU or any other international power to implement the far-reaching recommendations in the advisory opinion, effectively allowing Israel to continue its voracious colonization project in the occupied West Bank. This astounding failure by the so-called international community to hold Israel accountable to international law, or at least to end its unchallenged impunity, precipitated enough frustration and anger among Palestinians everywhere to trigger new thinking on how to most effectively attain justice and comprehensive peace that is based on it.

On the 9th July 2005, on the first anniversary of the ICJ’s ruling against the Wall, more than 170 Palestinian political parties, unions, organizations and networks, representing a substantive majority of Palestinian civil society, issued a historic Call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS,17 against Israel until it fulfills its obligations under international law and ends its three basic forms of injustice – occupation and colonization, institutionalized racial discrimination, and denial of UN-sanctioned refugee rights. The appeal said:

We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era. We appeal to you to pressure your respective states to impose embargoes and sanctions against Israel. We also invite conscientious Israelis to support this Call, for the sake of justice and genuine peace.

Coming a year after the Palestinian call for an academic and cultural boycott against Israel18 and inspired by the century-old Palestinian civil resistance to the Zionist conquest in its various manifestations and, more recently, by the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the BDS Call expanded the scope of the earlier appeal to include all domains: economic, financial and sports, among others. While BDS was at first received with mixed reactions by international civil society and vigorously

opposed by Israel, its lobby groups and support networks in the West, it succeeded in a fairly short period of time in putting the Israel boycott on the agenda of international solidarity groups and some trade unions and faith-based organizations. With its distinctly rights-based, approach, the BDS Call appealed to wide sectors in international civil society, inspiring and mobilizing them into launching effective, context-sensitive and sustainable campaigns against Israel and institutions – Israeli and international – that are complicit in its occupation and other forms of oppression.

Support for BDS grew steadily and sometimes impressively19 ever since the Call was launched. Palpable gains were made after the Palestinian leadership of the movement, the BDS National Committee, or BNC,20was announced in May 2008 and after that leadership succeeded, in partnership with Mewando, the leading Basque solidarity network, in organizing the first international BDS conference, the Bilbao Initiative,21 as well as in issuing a ground breaking, in-depth analysis of Israel’s regime over the Palestinian people.22 The illegal and patently immoral Israeli siege of the occupied Gaza Strip, with its direct and well-documented human impact, which includes a sharp rise in poverty, disease and mortality rates, and that culminated in the recent war of aggression. These factors played an undeniable role in turning BDS into a truly global movement, winning the crucial endorsement of a number of key intellectual and cultural figures as well as an increasing number of major trade unions and other civil society associations. As a result, there was a surge in creative and institutionally sustainable BDS measures adopted by individuals and groups across the world, indicated beyond doubt that a new, unprecedented era of Palestine solidarity has arrived, evoking memories of the fight against South African apartheid.23

In this context, the ground was prepared for Palestinian and international civil society to take concrete action against the light rail project in Jerusalem. In fact, the BNC has directly appealed to and worked with solidarity movements in several countries to launch or expand and co-ordinate campaigns against companies involved in the JLR project as the most effective means of resisting the project.
Derailing Veolia and Alstom

One of the earlier BNC efforts to counter JLR-implicated corporations was the appeal24 sent to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign and the Civic Coalition for Defending the Palestinians’ Rights in Jerusalem, urging the Saudi government not to award Alstom a $2.5 billion contract to build a power plant. On top of presenting the legal, political and moral arguments against Alstom, the document detailed the historic commitment of Saudi Arabia to the Palestinian cause in general and the question of occupied Jerusalem in particular, concluding that awarding this lucrative contract to a company that is colluding in Israel’s declared intent to further colonize and “Judaize” the Holy City would, for all intents and purposes, undermine these unique commitments, not to mention obligations under international law. Needless to say, the Saudi government has yet to respond to the appeal, let alone heed it. In fact, according to a recent report in the Dubai-based Gulf News,25 “Alstom is part of a consortium awarded a $1.8 billion (Dh6.6 billion) civil works contract in March for the Makkah-Madinah railway, the Haramain Express.” It is a bitter irony that Saudi Arabia is allowing the same company that is unapologetically complicit in colonizing Jerusalem that is regarded in Islam as a holy city, to build a railway connecting Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina. This has prompted even the normally complacent Palestinian Authority to register an official complaint with the Saudis and try to convince them to scrap Alstom’s involvement in the Haramain Express.26

In Europe, however, the scene was friendlier for the campaign against the JLR partner companies. At the aforementioned Bilbao Initiative, human rights lawyers, activists and trade unionists, in full coordination with the BDS National Committee, launched several focused BDS campaigns, targeting corporations and institutions that are unmistakably and quite manifestly complicit in aspects of Israel’s multifaceted system of oppression against the Palestinians. Thus the “Derail Veolia” campaign was born, aiming to coordinate already existing efforts in several countries and/or launching new ones to pressure Veolia, as well as Alstom, to withdraw from the illegal project by threatening them with public boycott campaigns if they failed to do so.

The examples below are from the most significant local campaigns against the two French companies involved in the JLR project shed some light on the innovative and principled tactics used and the impressive achievements reached to date.

After a long pressure campaign initiated by one determined and resourceful human rights activist and eventually endorsed by influential civil society groups in the Netherlands, Dutch bank ASN, which identifies itself as an “ethical bank” that upholds international law and human rights, decided in November 2006 to divest from Veolia Transport and other companies that benefit from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory.27 The decision followed months of meticulous research, networking and employing public awareness initiatives undertaken by the campaign organizers. United Civilians for Peace, a coalition of Dutch organizations advocating peace, human rights and development produced a well-researched document detailing the links between Dutch companies and the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. The Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign was also involved in the campaign at various stages, providing empirical data and advice. Simultaneously, questions were raised in the Dutch parliament about a specific Dutch company involved in the construction of the illegal Wall. Veolia’s initial claims that it was not aware that its involvement in the JLR was illegal rang hollow given the fact that Amnesty International in France had issued a clearly worded document28 stating just that, months earlier, and had warned Veolia’s management not to get involved in this project.

Together, these developments led to xtensive media coverage of the whole issue of complicity as well as legal and ethical responsibility of companies, which in turn raised the level of pressure on ASN Bank significantly, convincing it to start a process of investigation of Veolia’s involvement in the objectionable project and, eventually, to end its investments in it.

A Swedish coalition of faith-based groups, led by Diakonia, was quick to follow suit. During Israel’s atrocious war on Gaza, the Stockholm community council announced29 that Veolia, which had been the operator of the Stockholm County metro for the past ten years, lost the contract for the coming eight years. The contract, worth 3.5 billion euros (approximately $4.5 billion), is considered the largest ongoing public contract procurement process in Europe. And although the Council stated that their decision was based solely on commercial considerations, the massive public campaign waged by Swedish groups against Veolia in the months leading to the decision could not but have been a decisive factor for any politician hoping to get re-elected.

Adri Nieuwhof, a human rights advocate that has played a leading role in exposing European corporate complicity in Israel’s occupation, had this to say about the impressive Swedish public campaign against Veolia:

Swedish activists informed the public about the role of companies in benefiting from the occupation through several actions. The Swedish non-governmental organization Diakonia’s research on [the] Mul-T-Lock factory in the Barkan Industrial Park in a West Bank settlement led to the October 2008 decision of [factory] owner Assa Abloy to divest from the company. At that time Veolia was bidding for an eight-year, $4.5 billion contract to run the subway in Stockholm County. Swedish journalists questioned politicians about Veolia’s role in an Israeli tramway project that links Israeli settlements and normalizes the illegal situation of the settlements. At the Give Veolia the Red Card event on 15th November 2008, passengers on the Stockholm subway were asked to attach a red card to their clothes to protest Veolia’s involvement in the Jerusalem tramway on occupied Palestinian territory. 30

Weeks after this meaningful defeat for Veolia in Sweden, its partner in the JLR project suffered as momentous a setback when the Swedish national pension fund, AP7, decided to exclude Alstom from its investment portfolio.31 Considering the size of the Swedish fund, $15 billion, this decision was bound to have serious consequences for Alstom and other companies in a similar situation. This time, however, the decision was explicitly justified on the grounds of Alstom’s involvement in the illegal JLR project, reflecting on the one hand the intensifying discontent among the Swedish public, especially after Gaza, with companies that profit from unethical and illegal Israeli projects and, on the other hand, their determination to make them – literally – pay for it.

Towards the end of March, Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) in the West Midlands, United Kingdom, celebrated another significant victory in the campaign against the JLR. The Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council decided not to consider further Veolia’s bid for the ‘Waste Improvement Plan’ contract, which is worth about $1.5 billion over 20 years.32 Again, the Council insists that the decision was commercial, not political. And, again, the public pressure that was brought to bear before the decision looked too sweeping to ignore.

Elsewhere in the UK, several local campaigns are sprouting to derail Veolia from a number of large public works contracts. From Hampshire County to Liverpool to Camden to South Yorkshire, local authorities are facing mounting political, and sometimes legal pressure from Palestine solidarity groups, mainly associated with PSC, to exclude Veolia from bidding for public projects.

Most recently, Veolia started feeling the heat at home. The Greater Bordeaux local government announced that it was awarding – on commercial grounds, of course – a $1 billion contract for the biggest urban network in France to Veolia’s competitor, despite intense lobbying by Veolia. La plateforme BDS Bordeaux marked this achievement saying, “In fact, Veolia’s involvement in the situation of [Israeli] apartheid has already led to its loss of several contracts, and this is just the beginning.”33
Artistic Resistance

In Australia, the campaign against Veolia’s subsidiary, Connex, took on an entirely new shape. Award winning visual artist, Van Thanh Rudd, created a stir in Melbourne, Australia with his installation “Economy of Movement – A Piece of Palestine.”34 Rudd’s installation, which looks like a museum display, shows a stone sitting upon a glass base. A panel hanging behind it reads: “The stone exhibited is from East Jerusalem (occupied Palestinian territory). It was thrown at an Israeli Defense Force (IDF) tank by a Palestinian youth.” Another panel to the right reads: “IDF tanks are protecting French companies Veolia (Connex) and Alstom as they conduct illegal operations on occupied Palestinian territory.” Rudd explained his motives saying, “I thought it would be a great opportunity to make artwork that would clearly outline Veolia’s illegal operations on occupied Palestinian territory.”
Taste of Victory

In an unexpected turn of events, and after months of intensive lobbying and awareness-raising by the Derail Veolia and Alstom campaign, Haaretz reported35 that Veolia was “abandoning” the JLR and was even “trying to sell its 5% stake in Citypass, the light rail consortium.” According to the report, “The organization based itself on an article in French law that allows the court to void business agreements, signed by French companies, that violate international law.” However, it cites “political pressure” and the loss of “major projects in Europe because of its involvement in the Jerusalem job” were the “real reason” for Veolia’s withdrawal from the JLR, according to unnamed observers.

Another victory came from a more expected quarter. The London-based Islamic Human Rights Commission recently reported36 that “Tehran’s mayor scrapped plans for Veolia to have a key role in the city’s urban transport system.” The BNC had sent a letter to the Iranian leadership last May through European NGOs in Geneva, during the UN Durban Review conference, reminding Tehran of its commitments and obligations to contribute to the defense of Jerusalem against Israel’s colonial designs and urging it to exclude Veolia and Alstom from all Iranian public works contracts due to the companies’ involvement in the illegal JLR project.

Despite Veolia’s reported announcement that it was withdrawing from the JLR, the Derail Veolia and Alstom Campaign “plans to keep the pressure on Veolia and Alstom until the companies end their services to Israel’s activities and projects that are in violation of international law,” as stated by Adri Nieuwhof.37 Specifically, Veolia is still involved in providing bus services that link Jerusalem with illegal colonies and in the dumping of waste from Israel and its settlements in the Tovlan landfill in the occupied Jordan Valley.38

Final Remarks

From Melbourne to Stockholm to Bordeaux to the West Midlands, companies implicated in the JLR project are not just facing symbolic protests by marginalized demonstrators; they are experiencing real, deep losses that many indicators show are directly connected with their JLR involvement. What initially seemed like a desperate swim against the tide to reach the shores of justice is increasingly looking like a great wind that may well cause the tide itself to be reversed.

Omar Barghouti is an independent analyst, human rights advocate and a founding member of the Palestinian civil society campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel (www.BDSmovement.net).

Endnotes

1 The BDS Call, issued on 9 July 2005, was endorsed by over 170 Palestinian political parties, unions, organizations and networks, representing Palestinians under occupation, in Israel, and in exile. The Call and list of endorsers are at: http:// www.bdsmovement.net/?q=node/52

2 http://www.rakevetkala-jerusalem.org.il/images/ Eng_brochure.pdf

3 In August 2007, then UN special reporter for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, Prof. John Dugard, described the Wall to the UN General Assembly in saying, “The 75-km wall being built in East Jerusalem is now almost complete …. This wall, which is built through Palestinian neighbourhoods and separates Palestinians from Palestinians, is an exercise in social engineering, designed to achieve the Judaization of Jerusalem by reducing the number of Palestinians in the city. It cannot conceivably be justified on security grounds.”

http://domino.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0080ef30 efce525585256c38006eacae/07fc06140216684 18525736b005c8a82!OpenDocument

4 While East Jerusalem is recognized by the United Nations as part of the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967, the rest of the city, now called “West Jerusalem,” was also occupied militarily by Zionist forces in 1948, in violation of the partition plan that envisioned placing the entire city under international jurisdiction.

5 Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention specifically prohibits the occupying power from transferring parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies. When extensive appropriation of property is involved, without military necessity, the infringement may amount to a war crime: http://www.unhchr.ch/html/ menu3/b/92.htm

6 In his March 2009 report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, Prof. Richard Falk, the current UN special reporter for human rights in the OPT, states that, “there are a variety of concerns about the Palestinian future in East Jerusalem, and allegations that Israel is engaged in a subtle, but cumulatively very efficient, process of ‘ethnic cleansing’ to ensure Jewish demographic dominance of the whole of Jerusalem. A variety of practices have elicited Palestinian complaints, and seem validated by independent observers … .” http:// www.transnational.org/Area_MiddleEast/2009/ Falk_OralStatement_Gaza.html

7 For more on this see: Ilan Pappe, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. (Oxford: One World Publications, 2007)

8 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1084402. html

9 The Grassroots Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign and the Civic Coalition for Defending the Palestinians’ Rights in Jerusalem, A call to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia not to contract Alstom Ltd. its new power plant in Shoaiba: http://www.stopthewall.org/downloads/pdf/ briefing%20Alstom.pdf

10 See the map in the brochure at: http://www. rakevetkala-jerusalem.org.il/images/Eng_ brochure.pdf

11 In its Advisory Opinion titled Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the ICJ stated, “The Court concludes that the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (including East Jerusalem) have been established in breach of international law. http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/ files/131/1677.pdf

12 The Israeli Coalition of Women for Peace keeps an up-to-date list of Israeli and international companies implicated in violations of international law in the OPT: http://www. whoprofits.org/

13 Negotiation Support Unit. Jerusalem Light Rail Fact Sheet. March 2007.

14 http://www.france-palestine.org/article10614. html (French)

15 http://www.france-palestine.org/imprimersans. php3?id_article=11680

16 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ. do?uri=CELEX:32004L0018:EN:NOT

17 http://www.bdsmovement.net/?q=node/52

18 http://www.pacbi.org/etemplate.php?id=869

19 For a partial list of international organizational endorsers of BDS see: http://www.bdsmovement. net/?q=node/139

20 For more on the BNC’s make up and activities see: http://www.bdsmovement.net/?q=node/126

21 http://www.bdsmovement.net/?q=node/213

22 http://bdsmovement.net/?q=node/222

23 For more on this see: Omar Barghouti, Our South Africa Moment Has Arrived. http://www. palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details. php?id=14921

24 http://www.stopthewall.org/downloads/pdf/ briefing%20Alstom.pdf

25 http://www.gulfnews.com/Region/Middle_ East/10318479.html

26 http://www.gulfnews.com/Region/Middle_ East/10318479.html

27 http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article6076. shtml

28 http://www.amnesty.fr/index.php/amnesty/s_ informer/la_chronique/mars_2006_sommaire/ israel_et_territoires_occupes

29 http://www.diakonia.se/sa/node.asp?node=2807

30 http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10418.

shtml

31 Ibid.

32 http://www.palestinecampaign.org/index7b. asp?m_id=1&l1_id=4&l2_id=25&Content_ ID=546

33 This is based on a rough English translation of the original French original statement at: http:// www.ism-france.org/news/article.php?id=1164 9&type=communique&lesujet=Boycott

34 http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10388. shtml

35 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1091186. html

36 http://www.ihrc.org/

37 http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10599. shtml

38 http://www.whoprofits.org/Company%20Info. php?id=581