INTRODUCTION
The Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), the largest coalition in Palestinian society that is leading the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, salutes activists, organizations, and institutions worldwide that have expressed meaningful solidarity with our urgent struggle to end Israel’s live-streamed genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. To help dismantle Israel’s underlying, decades-old regime of settler-colonial apartheid, we need to escalate BDS campaigns, building more people power to challenge all forms of complicity in Israel’s system of oppression, including corporate complicity.
Corporations that are implicated in the commission of international crimes connected to Israel’s unlawful occupation, racial segregation, apartheid regime (against the entire Indigenous Palestinian people), or genocide are all complicit, according to the BDS movement’s Corporate Complicity Criteria, and must be held accountable. Direct complicity includes military security, technological, financial, logistical, or infrastructure support.
Investors should not knowingly profit from, provide capital to, or invest in companies implicated in such grave violations of human rights as defined in international law (including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide). Institutional investors have a legal, not just moral, obligation to divest from and exclude from contracts corporations that knowingly and persistently enable such violations if they fail to make these companies end such complicity.
THE “D” IN BDS
Divestment, or the “D” in BDS, is shorthand for institutional pressure against complicit corporations that are knowingly and persistently implicated in Israel’s crimes and grave human rights violations, particularly genocide, apartheid, and occupation. Institutional pressure uses an institution’s leverage to pressure companies where it invests or does business to cut their ties with such violations.
To make institutions apply this institutional pressure on complicit corporations, grassroots solidarity movements and civil society groups must apply pressure on pension and investment funds and other institutions (such as city councils, universities, trade unions, etc.) to, in turn, cut back or end contracts, investments, and/or other financial ties to such complicit corporations. Institutional pressure includes most prominently, and whenever feasible, the following forms:
- Exclusion from sourcing/procurement contracts (whenever viable alternatives exist)
- Divestment (for funds/institutions that invest in the global stock markets)
- Shareholder activism
- Strategic litigation
This differs from the “B” in BDS, which includes among its tactics academic, cultural, and sports boycotts, as well as consumer boycotts, peaceful disruption, protests, de-shelving, etc., against corporate priority targets.
RATIONALE
Israel was established as a settler colony on top of the ruins of Palestinian society during the 1948 Nakba of ethnic cleansing. Zionist militias, and later the Israeli army, forcibly displaced most of the Indigenous people of Palestine in a planned, systematic method, destroying hundreds of our villages and towns and denying our refugees their inherent, UN-stipulated right to return and receive reparations. In 1967, Israel occupied the remaining parts of historic Palestine, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, further ethnically cleansing Palestinians and building illegal colonies. Since 1948, Israel has maintained against the Palestinian people a regime of settler-colonialism and the crime against humanity of apartheid.
In January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) affirmed the plausibility that Israel is violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza. On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal Court (ICC) finally issued its long overdue arrest warrants against sitting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former war cabinet minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated in Gaza.
On 20 September 2024, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, issued an authoritative interpretation of the relevant legal obligations of states. It said: “States have a duty to conduct a due diligence review of all transfer and trade agreements with Israel, including but not limited to equipment, weapons, munitions, parts, components, dual-use items, and technology, to determine whether the goods or technology subject to the transfer or trade contribute to maintaining the unlawful occupation or are used to commit violations of international law.
In July 2024, the ICJ ruled that Israel’s entire occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is illegal and that Israel is violating the prohibition against apartheid. In the words of Craig Mokhiber, a former senior UN human rights official, this ruling makes BDS “not only a moral imperative and constitutional and human right but also an international legal obligation.”
Corporations and investors are also bound by ethical, legal, and fiduciary/financial obligations.
Based on all the above, all investors have an ethical obligation to divest from Israel. This apartheid state subjugates millions of Indigenous people under a ruthless regime of military occupation and applies institutional pressure on corporations that enable its regime of oppression. This obligation is heightened, given Israel’s perpetration of genocide.
As an intersectional movement that connects Palestinian liberation with racial, indigenous, social, gender, and climate justice struggles, the BDS movement prioritizes institutional pressure against companies that are involved in militarism and oppressing other communities as well as Palestinians. Where applicable, we call for adopting an ethical investment policy or a universal human rights-based investment screen, as the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) proposed, to prevent investments in all companies complicit in grave human rights violations anywhere.
All legal entities, as well as natural persons, including investors, have a legal responsibility not to be involved in the commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide.
Corporations, as well as their boards of directors and executives, may face criminal liability for complicity in international crimes, particularly atrocity crimes (war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide).
Investors are also required to respect human rights. They must prevent and mitigate direct corporate impacts on human rights, as set out in the UN Guiding Principles of Business and Human Rights and other relevant (and evolving) international law mechanisms.
Doing business with Israel and investing in it is not only unethical and illegal but also financially irresponsible. Since January 2023, well before the genocide in Gaza, Israel’s economy has been in steady, at times drastic decline, with the effective control of the far-right and openly fascist parties over government, shredding Israel’s worn mask of “democracy” and “the rule of law.” With the genocide, Israel’s economy started showing signs of imminent “collapse.” Israel is quickly turning into what the BDS movement calls a #ShutDownNation, with the dramatic flight of capital, severe brain drain, drying foreign direct investments in high tech, and a generally unsafe, unstable, and “collapsing” economy. This should help us mobilize most investors and shareholders to oppose any investment in Israel or in companies that enable its regime of colonial oppression.
