Why Human Rights Watch Is Urging Companies to Pull Out of Israeli Settlements

New report stops short of calling for boycott of firms but lays legal foundation for pressuring them over Israel's settlement policy

Firms doing business in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are violating international law by harming the rights of the Palestinians who live in the area and should pull out, Human Rights Watch (HRW) says in a report released today. The New York-based advocacy group stops short of calling for a boycott of such businesses in the 162-page report, titled “Occupation, Inc: How Settlement Businesses Contribute to Israel’s Violations of Palestinian Rights.” HRW urges companies to fulfill their obligations to respect the human rights of populations living where they operate—and for companies, rather than consumers that buy their products, to confirm their goods have not come from the 1,000 companies doing business in Israeli-owned industrial zones, on plantation-style farms and quarries on Palestinian land.

The report is still sure to enrage officials in Israel, which has been slowly taking over the West Bank since the territory fell under Israeli military occupation with the lightning defeat of an array of Arab armies in the 1967 Six-Day War. In the 49 years since, a half million Jewish Israelis have taken up residence in the hills and desert valley above the west bank of the Jordan River, as well in East Jerusalem (which Israel said it annexed, rather than military occupied, after the Six-Day War). Along with the Gaza Strip, the crowded coastal enclave from which Israel pulled settlers and troops in 2005, the West Bank was to form a nation-state for millions of Palestinians, in the “two-states for two-peoples” formulation that has been the ostensible diplomatic solution to a conflict that dates back a century, when Jews began arriving in the region to build a homeland for themselves.

But as diplomacy has faltered—the 1994 Oslo Accords produced high hopes followed by nearly a decade of terror and fighting — activists both in Palestine and the West have turned to economic pressure, hoping that boycotts and international opprobrium would force concessions from Israel. But the effort itself is splintered. The umbrella term for the movement—BDS, for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions—in fact is a specific organization based in Ramallah that aims to do much more than pressure Israel out of the West Bank. BDS would turn the clock back to 1948, by requiring Israel to surrender the very land on which it was founded. The approach supports Israeli allegations that the larger boycott movement amounts to a “strategic threat” to Israel’s existence as a Jewish homeland; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has likened boycotts to the actions of Nazi Germany.

http://time.com/4183059/why-human-rights-watch-is-urging-companies-to-pull-out-of-israeli-settlements/