SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
west bank
New Boycott Campaign Targets Companies Profiting From Illegal Israeli Settlements in West Bank
"We cannot allow international companies and governments to profit from occupation, dispossession and human suffering," said one peace advocate.
Sep 15, 2025
Oxfam International on Monday announced a new boycott campaign aimed at companies that do business with illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
The campaign, called "Stop Trade With Settlements," is being sponsored by more than 80 civil society organizations and it names multiple companies including Barclays Bank, Siemens, and Carrefour as firms that are benefiting from selling goods and services to the settlements.
In a statement announcing the boycott campaign, Oxfam explained why "ending trade with settlements is a necessary step to uphold human rights, protect Palestinian livelihoods, stop Israel’s settlement expansion, and end the unlawful occupation" of the West Bank.
"Over the last four years, Israel has significantly accelerated its settlement activities in the West Bank," the organization said. "Most of these approvals were granted for settlements located 'deep into the West Bank,' further fragmenting Palestinian territory and imposing new movement restrictions on Palestinians."
"The revival of the ‘E1’ plan... is effectively cutting off Palestinian movement between the northern and southern West Bank," the group added, referring to the E1 settlement that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed off on last week. The plan will "bury" the possibility of a Palestinian state by cutting East Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank.
Oxfam then walked through how these firms are profiting from doing business in the West Bank.
German travel conglomerate TUI, for example, offers a bus tour through the West Bank for tourists to meet with settlers who are illegally living on Palestinians' land.
Siemens, meanwhile, was found to have provided "equipment and services for settlement-linked transportation infrastructure including a rail deal worth over €1 billion."
The report singled out Barclays for providing $18.1 billion in loans to settlement-linked firms over a three-and-a-half-year period, which the report said made it "the third largest creditor of corporations complicit in settlement trade."
Anne-Marie Clements, engagement officer at the Catholic charity Justice and Peace Scotland, spoke of her recent trip to the occupied West Bank, where she met Palestinians who "told me of land confiscation, settler violence, home demolitions, military checkpoints and the denial of water: all daily realities of the occupation that make life unbearable."
Clements said the reality on the ground in the West Bank made it imperative for her organization to support the boycott campaign.
"The Stop Trade With Settlements campaign shines a light on how the illegal settlements, an integral part of the occupation, are sustained through trade," she said. "Ending this trade is not just a political necessity but a moral imperative. We cannot allow international companies and governments to profit from occupation, dispossession, and human suffering."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Netanyahu Says 'There Will Be No Palestinian State,' Signing E1 Settlement Agreement
The plan threatens 7,000 Palestinians with forced displacement and would cut East Jerusalem off from the rest of the West Bank.
Sep 12, 2025
With a growing number of countries around the world recognizing Palestinian statehood, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday declared that "there will be no Palestinian state" as he signed an agreement to develop a key settlement in the West Bank—prompting calls for the international community to hold Israel accountable for its illegal occupation and apartheid policies in Palestinian territories.
At an event in the settlement of Maale Adumim, Netanyahu was joined by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Construction and Housing Minister Haim Katz as he signed an agreement with the town to develop 3,400 new housing units in the E1 settlement, which has long been stalled due to US opposition.
The Trump administration has reversed that opposition, clearing the way for Israel to link thousands of illegal settlements together and cut off East Jerusalem—which Palestinians have named as the future capital of a Palestinian state—from the rest of the West Bank.
Netanyahu said Thursday that the plan will "double the population" of Israelis in Maale Adumim, which like all of Israel's settlements in the West Bank is illegal under international law. Last year, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank is illegal and said it was guilty of confiscating "large areas" of Palestinian land for Israeli settlers.
“We are going to fulfill our promise that there will be no Palestinian state. This place belongs to us," said Netanyahu.
As +972 Magazine reported Friday, 7,000 Palestinians in the West Bank face forced displacement if the plan moves forward, and north-south travel could become "almost impossible," as the proposed settlement would establish separate roads for Palestinians and Israelis and would divert Palestinian drivers from Route 1 onto a bypass.
The town of Ezariyah, where many current residents travel frequently for shopping and other daily needs, "would become a geographically isolated island," Mohammad Mattar, a member of the town's municipality, told +972. "The road will cut right against people’s homes, leaving no room for natural expansion, and the town will lose thousands of dunams of land. This will force many residents to leave and deal a devastating economic blow.”
Mattar said that 112 demolition orders have already been issued for homes, shops, factories, and farmland.
"Some businesses have already evacuated and cut their losses, while others are waiting," he said. "It will force many residents to leave, particularly Jerusalemites who have built their lives and livelihoods around the town."
On Thursday, the Israeli anti-settlement watchdog Peace Now reported that it had prepared billboards denouncing the E1 plan to display in Maale Adumim during Netanyahu's event, but Mayor Guy Yifrah blocked them from being displayed.
In addition to "burying" the possibility of a Palestinian state, as Smotrich said last month, "the annexation led by Smotrich and Netanyahu will bury Israel," Peace Now said.
Nabil Abu Rudeineh, presidential spokesperson for the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, told Al Jazeera that a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital is "inevitable" regardless of Netanyahu's agreement to the E1 plan.
Rudeineh noted that 149 United Nations member states have recognized Palestinian statehood, with the number jumping in recent months as countries including France and Ireland have announced their recognition, and called on other countries to do the same to increase pressure on Netanyahu to back off the E1 plan.
"As more governments recognize a Palestinian state, it makes it harder for Netanyahu to proceed with his preferred options—mass expulsion (no Palestinians for a state) or endless apartheid (oppressive occupation with no state)," said Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, last week.
Inès Abdel Razek, executive director of the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy, told +972 that with Israel starving the people of Gaza with its blockade on humanitarian aid and slaughtering more than 64,000 Palestinians there so far since beginning its bombardment of the exclave nearly two years ago while also stepping up violence in the West Bank, the recognition of a Palestinian state by individual countries is "increasingly irrelevant."
"The most we can say about the fact that governments choose recognition as a measure right now, in the midst of a genocide that needs to end, is that it is really too little, too late," she told +972. "What governments should be doing, not only as a moral obligation, but as a political and legal obligation under international law, is to end the genocide and the occupation, and to hold Israel accountable."
"For the PA, recognition is a victory," said Abdel Razek. "But if you look on the ground, there is little resembling a Palestinian state... What does exist are Palestinians themselves, fighting to remain on their land and to see their fundamental right to self-determination fulfilled."
Keep ReadingShow Less
In Palestine, Food Is a Way to Survive, Resist, and Come Together
For the past two years, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have continued Indigenous practices in the face of deprivation and foreign occupation.
Sep 12, 2025
Food—and the denial of it—has come into sharp focus with the Israeli occupation’s mass starvation and genocide in Gaza and the increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Famine has been officially declared in Gaza.
The United Nations World Food Programme had estimated that at least 470,000 people have been enduring famine-like conditions in Gaza, a number growing by the day as the siege and blockade of food into Gaza continues
One in 5 children in Gaza suffers from "severe malnutrition" as of late July. When food is available to buy, the prices of essentials are astronomical, and privatized food aid delivery remains erratic, unsafe, and cruel, with several people shot dead while attempting to secure anything they can get to feed their families.
Amid these atrocities and the images of emaciated Palestinians, it is vital to remember that across every village in Palestine, food has not just been a means to survive but the connective tissue to our culture, identity, liberation, resistance, and to our land. Centuries-old food practices live on in the homes of the steadfast residents that remain. The ingredients and where and how they are grown may have changed as a result of decades of occupation and colonial violence, but customs and flavors endure.
Palestinians adapt and resist, and have done so for almost 80 years.
Agricultural practices and communities have adapted and been transformed. Some have vanished with decades of displacement and extermination, while others have stood firm and celebrated a resurgence. Recipes have evolved to make use of new ingredients connected to the struggle for land and resources, and traditions like al-ʿAwna, a system of collective agricultural labor, embody this spirit of adaptation and resilience. Rooted in mutual aid, al-ʿAwna has long repelled colonial tactics of extermination and displacement by providing communal opportunities to cultivate land, acquire food, cook, and support one another.
For Palestinians, food has been a means to prevail.
A History of Adaptation and Mutual Aid
During the Nakba (the catastrophe) of 1948, more than 530 Palestinian villages were forcibly displaced. People were cut off from their land and farms and lost access to growing Indigenous produce. Many became refugees overnight, pushed into Gaza, the West Bank, and neighboring countries and compelled to take up work in urban areas as settler colonialism eroded links to land and agricultural traditions.
Today, Palestinians have to increasingly buy rather than grow their own food, but the meals prepared with these staple ingredients still feature in kitchens and on dinner tables.
Before 1948, farmers from Silwan, a Jerusalem neighborhood, would grow black-eyed beans and green chard in the Bustan area. Foraging for ingredients like khubayza, nettle, milk thistle, and mulberry leaves was and is still practiced in Palestine. Seeds were distributed among Palestinian communities to grow native fruits and vegetables, including a recent initiative in northern Gaza called Thamara that distributes these seeds to those living in tent camps as a result of Israel’s ongoing military onslaught in the Strip.
Food as solidarity
While Palestinians may have been separated from their land where they grew wheat and sesame, their dishes persisted through new recipes and food traditions from different towns and villages, fused into new culinary traditions. Rummaniyeh—a lentil and eggplant stew cooked in pomegranate juice—was modified by Palestinians from Lid and Ramleh who were displaced into Gaza. There, they added Gazan flavors like ‘ein jarada (dill seeds and chili) and red taheini (sesame sauce), giving birth to a distinct new flavor.
These culinary delights revolved around the concept of takaya (soup kitchens), an Islamic tradition based on communities looking after one another. Solidarity was the basis of food cooked and eaten together.
Many takaya were built hundreds of years ago, with Hebron’s itikea established in the 12th century and still in use today. Others followed during the Ottoman era, such as the Fatmeh Khatun itkiea in Jerusalem near Al-Aqsa Mosque, two takayas in Gaza, one in Al-Bireh, and another one in Jenin. Over time, traditions of takaya and giving became prevalent in every Palestinian town and village. Ouneh and faz’a, cultures of mutual aid through funding and community help, were also established to support those in need. Their existence defies settler colonialism ensuring survival and a sense of community despite threats of erasure (see Jerusalem in the Malmouk Era: History and Architecture, Taawon Publishers, Jerusalem, 2024).
Adapting and handing down recipes in spite of a decades-long history of erasure and dispossession is a way of resistance and for traditions to endure.
Six years ago, an initiative was launched in rural Jerusalem to prepare meals for resisters on Mount Sbih that settlers were attempting to occupy. Another itikea was launched in Jerusalem for hospital patients from Gaza who came to the city to receive treatment.
The occupation has realized that there is strength in our traditions of mutually preparing food and passing our recipes through generations. That is why it has targeted takaya across Palestine, destroying some 42 of them in recent years. But my research has consistently shown that our people and our food can overcome this, too.
Food as Memory
For so many Palestinians, certain dishes are tied to an event and a place in time and can evoke strong memories. Jarysheh, a dish of cracked wheat, meat broth, dried yogurt, and lamb, was a hallmark of weddings and funerals in Lifta and Dayr Yasin. But as elders such as Im Ibrahim, a woman from Dir Yasin, recalls: Jarysheh has not been made for a wedding since the Nakba—it is too deeply connected now with funerals and a sense of loss and death from the infamous Dayr Yasin Massacre on April 9, 1948.
Efforts to elevate Palestinian cuisine and food traditions can help prevent food appropriation and theft by the occupation. Adapting and handing down recipes in spite of a decades-long history of erasure and dispossession is a way of resistance and for traditions to endure.
Food Sovereignty, Survival, and Resistance in the Present Day
Today in Gaza, the soil is forever contaminated with heavy metals from the relentless Israeli bombardment. According to a recent estimate of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Gaza is left with only 1.5% of cropland that is accessible and suitable for cultivation. Last month, in a violent assault on Palestinian food sovereignty, Israeli occupation forces raided and destroyed a Palestinian seed bank in the West Bank city of Hebron. A few weeks ago, in the village of Al-Mughayyir near Ramallah, the Israeli military carried out raids, demolished homes, and seized land. In addition to all the violence and forced displacement against the people of Al-Mughayyir, the Israeli army also uprooted 3,000 olive trees from their land, leaving them without land and olives and struggling for the minimum to survive.
For the past two years, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have continued Indigenous practices in the face of deprivation and foreign occupation. Hundreds of takaya have sprung up across the strip and few in Tulkarem and Jenin. Food and money donations pour in, and volunteers help cook food. They have become the primary source of cooked meals for the majority of the displaced population.
What is happening in Palestine today, the starvation and bombardment of Gaza by the Israeli occupation, not only threatens people’s immediate food security, dignity, and health but severely imperils Palestinian food sovereignty. Adaptive practices with deep roots in Palestinian traditions are our hope. They are a means to survive both as people and as a culture and serve as a stark example of Palestinian resilience, resistance, and sense of community. There may no longer be Jarysheh at weddings or black-eyed beans on the farms of Bustan, but there is nevertheless a collective will to survive and, together with our food, outlive the forces that try to erase us.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular