“G4s Proudly Securing Israeli Apartheid” London bus stop subvertisement July 2012
Under immense pressure from activists, worldwide global security giant G4S has confirmed it will be dumping key contracts in the Occupied Palestinian Territories when they terminate in 2015. The Financial Times reports G4S “would exit the contracts covering Ofer [prison], the checkpoints and the West Bank police headquarters.”
At this time, the G4S plans to continue servicing security systems contracts after 2015 at prisons inside Israel that unlawfully house thousands of Palestinian political prisoners; Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention forbids the transfer Palestinian prisoners from occupied territories to prisons inside Israel. Palestinian civil society has condemned G4S’ complicity with these violations of international law.
“G4S is responding to the huge amount of public pressure it is facing across Europe and the Arab world for its deep complicity with Israeli violations of international law by repeating its existing position that it intends to pull out of some of its contracts in illegal Israeli settlements,” Zaid Shuaibi, spokesperson for the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee, told IBTimes UK.
However, the company will continue to service security systems in other sites inside Israel, including cameras and control rooms of prisons where Palestinians are held.
“Even if G4S does exit the contracts it has mentioned, it will remain involved in providing services to businesses and homes inside Israel’s illegal settlements and to prisons inside Israel at which Palestinians are illegally detained and subjected to torture,” said Shuaibi…..
[Last week] Nineteen human rights organisations in Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine issued a statement calling for the exclusion of G4S from contracts inside the European Union. Film directors Ken Loach and Mike Leigh wrote a letter to the BBC calling on it to “recognise there is a public interest in excluding G4S from the tendering process”.
“G4S has already lost contracts with universities, banks and charities across Europe as a result of public anger about its partnership with the Israeli government,” said Shuaibi.
“G4S stands to lose far more than the 1 percent of its global revenues it makes in Israel if it continues its involvement in Israeli human rights violations.”
The news comes one week before a change of guard at G4S: Ashley Almanza is about to succeed G4S’s Chief Financial Officer Trevor Dighton, who is retiring. Not unlike Unilever, “pure business motives” make this a good financial decision for G4S. The Financial Times mentions “reputational risk” as a priority for the company; and the potential G4S may be offloading more contracts with Israel in the coming months.
The Financial Times, G4S to quit key contracts in Israel:
Analysts have raised the prospect that G4S could be tempted to divest the Israeli business altogether. The company has raised “reputational risk” higher up the list of priorities …….
Kean Marden, analyst at Jefferies, the US investment bank, said in a note: “G4S Israel may be next to be divested? The Israel/Palestine conflict has created reputational issues. In our view the potential disposal of G4S Israel could be announced as soon as the 25 June capital markets day.”
G4S has established a risk committee and is conducting more formal reviews of the operational and reputational dangers of contracts worth more than £20m. It has also stated its ambition to offload underperforming parts of the business.
G4S – Profiting from: Israeli Apartheid, Prison Slavery, Deadly Deportations. More than 70 people demonstrated outside the G4S Annual General Meeting to protest against the company’s alleged human rights record in various markets, from Israeli prisons and UK immigration detention centres. June 7,2012
G4S earned a ranking of 3rd in the 2013 Public Eye Awards, the worst company of the year, following Shell and Goldman Sachs.
(Hat tip Mondoweiss commenter Les)
I too was excited about this when I read the Financial Times report the other day, but then I read Adri Nieuwhof’s report in the Electronic Intifada, which points out that G4S made similar announcements way back in 2002, then again in 2011. On both occasions they were responding to public pressure, but both times they quickly backtracked.
The lesson: unless people stay on their case, they’ll again reverse themselves, and they won’t give up the contracts in Israel.
Dersh and the other bot wizards can scream abuse 24/7 but they can’t make Israeli colonisation respectable. Yesha is dirty .
Set up a wholly owned subsidiary in the USA. Tell no one. And the contract is back in business.
The British are bankrupt. They need the money.
I agree that G4S’s recent statements were stronger than the 2011 statement. Let’s hope that this time they really do what they say and, further, get out of Israel altogether. But in view of their weaselly behavior after the 2011 statement and even more clearly after the predecessor company announced in 2002 that it was leaving the West Bank but never did, I think a good bit of caution is in order.
As to the history, while most of us here may not have had any awareness of G4S until recently, folks in Europe have been on the case much longer. The predecessor company’s short-lived withdrawal from the West Bank in 2002 was, according to Nieuwhof, a response to criticism from the then Foreign Minister of Denmark. The 2011 statement was a response to an exposé and public campaign launched in November 2010 by DanWatch, a Danish activist organization; a presentation by people from WhoProfits.org that same month at the Russell Tribunal on Palestine in London (included in the book Corporate Complicity in Israel’s Occupation; and then a detailed report from WhoProfits in early 2011.
In other words, while this recent announcement is a response to public pressure, so too were the previous announcements that turned out to be pretty much meaningless. As I said, I agree that this one represents more of a commitment (at least compared to the 2011 one), and the BDS movement is bigger, but weasels are weasels….
In the past 6 months or so there have been several corporations that have pulled out of business ventures and investments with Israel…citing risk and security concerns…I posted a few examples on here a while back.
Also of note Israel has lost about half of it’s foreign investment capital–less money flowing into business in Isr.
Some of this may be because other countries are coming to the head of the pack with increasingly educated and skilled but still cheap labor for foreign investors and offshore companies, like India who has already cut away a large part of Israel’s generic drug business and diamond cutting business.
But ‘risk’ are a large factor in corps looking at their involvements and Israel keeps making itself riskier. Also another way down the line possibility is Israel ever getting hauled to the ICC and what could come of that—check with Hostage but I believe that under the Int law providing ‘services’ in a illegal act such as Israel’s occupation carries some penalties also. Think of the billions in lawsuits brought by the holocaust group against corps that had anything to do with services to the nazis…railroads, banks, IBM, every company even remotely connected.
Could be some corps aren’t willing to take a chance on that possibility no matter how remote it might seem right now. Imagine the damages the Palestines could collect from everyone involved over a 65 year period.