Profiting from the Occupation: The corporate interests fuelling conflict in Palestine Nick Dearden,
War on Want, 6 July 2006
We hear little from the Palestinian Occupied Territories other than endless death, destruction, poverty and despair. While living standards plummet and the death toll rockets, it’s difficult to imagine a less likely place to make a profit. But despite the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding, and the international attention it receives, names familiar on high streets across Europe and the US are actively supporting Israel’s Occupation of Palestine through their business practices – threatening to prolong the misery of the Palestinian people for many years to come.
US multinational construction company Caterpillar has already been singled out, supplying as it does militarised bulldozers to the Israeli Army through the US’s Foreign Military Sales programme. A recent War on Want fact-finding mission confirmed the opinion of an Israeli military Commander, who calls these monster machines the “key weapon” in the ever deepening colonisation of the West Bank. The litany of war crimes which these machines are used for is shocking – demolition of many thousands of Palestinian homes, sometimes on top of their residents; destruction of agricultural land, water supplies, olive and fruit trees; and the construction of the illegal Separation Wall currently encircling Palestinian towns, separating communities and turning the West Bank into a giant prison. All the more incredible then that Caterpillar’s Chief Executive Jim Owens can still claim that “Caterpillar does well by doing good around the world.”
The disinvestment campaign against Caterpillar has sparked debate about corporate complicity throughout many Christian Churches; not least in the Church of England where the General Synod has voted to begin a divestment process, while the Church Commissioners who hold the purse strings, have taken a different decision. In recent weeks the Methodist Church and the United Church of Toronto have voted to use the threat of divestment as a means of pressuring companies to stop aiding the Israeli Occupation.
But Caterpillar is not alone. Many people in the south-east of England will have fond memories (or otherwise) of French train operator Connex, which ran trains out of London for seven years before its franchise was terminated for poor financial management in 2003. Less well known is that one year earlier Connex, as the main partner in a consortium called CityPass, was awarded a $500 million contract to construct a light railway system connecting Jerusalem to illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem. Road works around Jerusalem’s Old City mark the beginning of the project which is planned for completion in 2020. Connex will run the operation of the line for the next 30 years, while another French partner, Alstrom, will provide the trains.
The problem is that East Jerusalem is not part of Israel. Indeed the Palestinians hope one day to have their capital here. But Israel’s illegal annexation of East Jerusalem threatens this dream. Israel has encouraged 200,000 settlers to move into East Jerusalem over the last 40 years, and is currently using these settlements, along with the Separation Wall, to cut off East Jerusalem, on which tens of thousands of Palestinians depend, from the rest of the West Bank. Israeli peace campaigner and Nobel peace prize nominee Jeff Halper told us that Israel’s current expansion programme around East Jerusalem will render any future Palestinian state “nothing more than a set of non-viable Indian reservations.”
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