Dear corporation: Corporate Watch and the Soil Association

by Tom Anderson – Taken from Corporate Watch’s latest magazine ‘The rules of engagement‘

In 2008 Corporate Watch decided to begin writing to companies with accusations levelled at them by grassroots campaigners, sometimes entering into lengthy discussions with them. Many of these communications were published as open letters on the Corporate Watch website, under the header Dear Corporation, along with the companies’ responses.

Order our forthcoming book ‘Targeting Israeli Apartheid: A BDS Handbook’

Corporate Watch will soon be releasing a new book on corporate complicity in Israel’s apartheid policies against Palestinians, providing relevant targets and other useful information for action. You can order an advance copy now by contacting us at contact@corporatewatch.org.

Focus on divestment campaigns: Palestine solidarity: hitting corporations where it hurts

By Michael Deas, European Coordinator of the Palestinian Boycott Divestment and Sanctions National Committee

Israeli apartheid is big business. Israeli and international arms companies profit not only from supplying the huge Israeli military machine but also by successfully marketing their products, having been used against Palestinians, as ‘battle-tested’. Meanwhile, massive state and private funding for the Israeli settler movement ensures that there is always money to be made from building and providing infrastructure and services to illegal, Jewish-only settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. International companies continue to expand into the Israeli market, despite its persistent violations of international law and subjugation of the indigenous Palestinian population.

Oxford University receives money from Israeli Trust

Campaigners for an academic/institutional boycott of Israel may be interested to know that Oxford University receives sponsorship from a philanthropic organisation close to the Israeli state. One course at Oxford, ‘Tradition and its Discontents; Ruptures in the Abrahamic Religions’, is sponsored by Yad Hanadiv, which acts in Israel on behalf of a number of Rothschild family philanthropic trusts. Projects of Yad Hanadiiv have included the building of the Israeli Knesset and the Israeli Supreme Court.

Palestinian academics and intellectuals have called upon the international community to comprehensively and consistently boycott all Israeli academic and cultural institutions as a contribution to the struggle to end Israel’s occupation, colonization and system of apartheid (read more here)

Veolia forced to pull out of scores of countries as BDS pressure continues

Veolia, the world’s biggest listed water utility company, has announced that it will pull out of half of the 77 countries it operates in due to financial difficulties. Veolia is the subject of a mushrooming campaign by the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement due to its operations in Israel and in occupied Palestine (see still doing israels dirty work veolias tovlan landfill in the jordan valley). Campaigns by grassroots groups have cost the company billions of dollars through exclusion from public tenders. At the beginning of August 2011 it was announced that Ealing Council in London had failed to select Veolia for a comprehensive tender for its domestic refuse, street cleaning and parks maintenance contract. The contract is worth approx £300m in total over 15 years and one of Ealing Council’s largest single contracts.