On Thursday September 18, the Global Day of Action for Palestine, Pax Christi USA and more than 20 other faith-based groups launched the Complicit Corporations: Expose and Divest campaign. This coalition has joined a broader network of organizations committed to exposing and divesting from the destructive role of Chevron and Palantir in the Israeli government’s mass atrocities and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank.
- We seek to leverage economic influence on US and Israeli political leaders for robust humanitarian aid and a permanent ceasefire.
- We call on Chevron and Palantir to stop all contracts with the Israeli government and Israeli fossil gas industry.
Palantir is one of the world’s most advanced data mining companies. The company supports the Israeli government through their Artificial Intelligence and surveillance contracts with the Israeli military, and even with public statements. Palantir is also enabling the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) to detain and deport mass numbers of immigrants.
Chevron’s fossil fuel extraction in the region enables Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation, as well as significant environmental damage. This campaign calls on Chevron to immediately cut its contracts with Israel. Following in the tradition of the anti-apartheid gas station boycotts of the 1960s and 1970s, Palestinians and allies are building a global movement to hold Chevron accountable through coordinated boycott and divestment initiatives.
- Use this link to read more about the Boycott Chevron campaign
- Use this link to read the “Company Complicity Profile” of Palantir
- Use this link to read more about Palantir at the American Friends Service Committee website.
- Use this link to read more about the Complicit Corporations campaign at the Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA) website.
By creating a mass movement of Christians, alongside persons of all faiths and none, exposing complicit corporations and exercising economic power through boycotts and divestment from companies that profit from apartheid, dispossession and genocide, this campaign will:
- Diminish the economic pillars that make violence against Palestinians possible.
- Create an economic and political incentive for key corporations and key US government officials influenced by those corporations to mitigate their support for the Israeli government and shift US policy to ensure robust humanitarian aid and a permanent ceasefire.
- Empower grassroots participants while also building pressure on policymakers, institutional investors, and church bodies.
- Open unexpected alliances across political divides, as even unexpected voices have begun objecting to US arms used against churches and civilians in Gaza.
- Join together with and supplement ongoing, movement-wide efforts to challenge complicit corporations.
Use this link to read more about the Complicit Corporations campaign at the Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA) website.
Indeed, prayers and words alone will not stop the enabling of genocide in Palestine nor the war in Ukraine or any other wars that depend on weaponry made in USA or the European Union. The arms manufacturers and the energy enterprises who lust for bloodshed because it makes money for them and the Democratic and Republican politicians who prostrate themselves before these entities of death are the incarnation of evil and the personification of Satan. Bravo for Pax Christi for its solidarity with this Expose, Divest and Boycott moment that neither our conference of Catholic Bishops nor the Vatican itself seem to have the valor or sufficient grace to join.
David-Ross Gerling, PhD