Part of the Series
Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation
In the eastern reaches of the Mediterranean Sea lie vast reserves of natural gas. For more than a decade, Israel has generated billions of dollars in revenue for state coffers by plundering the depths of the Tamar gas field; in 2019, fossil fuel companies also began producing gas at the larger, nearby Leviathan field. But it is a United States-based company that operates the bulk of Israel’s extraction activities: Chevron.
This January, the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) — the largest Palestinian-led coalition at the helm of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement — renewed calls for a global boycott of the fossil fuel company. “Chevron’s extraction activities generate billions of dollars in revenue for apartheid Israel and its war chest, helping to fund the ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza,” the BNC wrote in a statement.
The BDS movement had called for divestment from Chevron before, after the company took over as the primary owner and operator of Israel’s largest natural gas fields in 2020. Now, those efforts have expanded to include a consumer boycott of Chevron gas stations and its affiliates, including Texaco and Caltex.
The push to boycott Chevron is an excellent case study of how the BNC strategizes and organizes to achieve global BDS wins.
Not every company that is complicit in Israeli apartheid is an official BDS target, because, as the BNC explains on its site, “that would make it impossible to achieve concrete results.” For a company to be added to the BDS list, the BNC looks at a set of criteria, including measuring the potential target’s “level of complicity” and “the potential for forming a broad, cross-movement coalition against the target.” As the BNC explains, they’re looking to target companies where they will have a higher likelihood of success.
The result is a tightly curated list of companies whose ties are woven deep into Israel’s apartheid regime. This is why, for instance, Starbucks and McDonald’s are not on the official BDS list, though they are currently wildly popular targets of consumer boycotts. The BNC has nevertheless expressed its support for the organic grassroots movements against them.
But Chevron is a different beast. As a major economic partner of the state, it is directly implicated in Israeli genocide and apartheid. Chevron-operated pipelines and Chevron-extracted natural gas fuel the Israeli Electric Company (IEC), which supplies power to Israeli military bases, prisons and police stations. After Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967, the IEC took over the Palestinian power grid, supplying electricity to illegal settlements while denying power to some Palestinian communities.
As the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization dedicated to advancing peace and nonviolence, has noted, “The supply of electricity across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory is used as a tool of subjugation, collective punishment, annexation, and dispossession […] Some Palestinian communities inside Israel and across the Occupied Palestinian Territory are banned from connection to the grid, some are provided subpar services, some are charged differently than neighboring Jewish-Israelis, and many suffer punitive power cuts as a form of collective punishment. This is energy apartheid.”
In Gaza, power is also often used as a tool of collective punishment. Israel cut off its electricity supply to Gaza shortly after Hamas’s October 7 attacks — a potential violation of international humanitarian law. Even before Israel’s current assault on Gaza began, Palestinians in the Strip suffered from rolling blackouts of up to 16 hours per day.
Gaza has its own natural gas reserves less than 20 miles off its shore, but the Gaza Marine field has remained dormant since its discovery in 2000. For more than two decades, Israel prevented Palestinians from extracting the 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, even as the state embarked on its own drilling frenzy. In June 2023, Israel finally gave the green light for the Palestinian Authority (PA) to begin developing the field, but the legal relevance of the decision is unclear, as the PA has not controlled Gaza’s waters since it was ousted by Hamas in 2007.
This past October, about three weeks after launching its genocidal war, Israel announced that it was allowing a handful of foreign and Israeli companies concessions for natural gas exploration in areas within Gaza’s maritime borders. This is why, as the BNC wrote, “Chevron is implicated in Israel’s policy and practice of depriving the Palestinian people of their right to sovereignty over their natural resources.”
After the BDS movement made its call for a Chevron consumer boycott, the political utility of focusing on targets with cross-movement potential was immediately on display: The International Alliance of App-Based Transport Workers (IAATW), a coalition of 100,000 drivers and couriers from 20 countries, announced in March it would boycott all gas stations linked to Chevron.
“Inspired by the 1987 oil embargo against Shell for its role in South African apartheid, as app-based workers for companies such as Uber, Deliveroo, JustEat, Free Now, Glovo, Lyft, Grab, DoorDash, Grubhub, Amazon, Ola, Gojek, Didi, Bolt, Careems, we join the global boycott of Chevron-owned petrol and gas stations,” the IAATW said in a statement.
#BoycottChevron has also picked up divestment wins in several California cities. In January, the city of Hayward, in San Francisco’s East Bay, became the first in the country to divest its shares from four companies on the BDS list: Chevron, Caterpillar, Hyundai and Intel. The city council for nearby Richmond, California, followed suit in May, voting to divest from all stocks and mutual funds involving companies with ties to Israel. And the city council for Alameda, also near Oakland, announced in July it would restrict its investments in “fossil fuels and weapons of any kind.”
The city council votes in Richmond and Alameda also underscore how the global cause for Palestinian human rights is intricately linked to environmental justice. Richmond is home to a 2,900-acre Chevron petroleum refinery, which spilled 600 gallons of oil into the San Francisco Bay in 2021. Chevron agreed to pay $200,000 in a settlement for the spill and has also settled to pay another $550 million to the City of Richmond in lieu of a special refinery tax. Chevron is the largest source of air pollution in Richmond, and children in the area are admitted to the hospital for asthma at three times the rate of the rest of California.
“Ending the Gaza genocide is a climate issue,” said Olivia Katbi, North America coordinator for the BDS movement, in a statement. “Companies like Chevron help to fuel climate chaos and apartheid. Global grassroots struggles for indigenous land and resource rights, sustainability, and against the climate catastrophe brought on by corporate greed are intrinsically linked with the Palestinian struggle for liberation. There can be no end to climate colonialism without an end to settler colonialism.”
We know that consumer boycotts can work: Recently, Starbucks sales have plummeted in part due to the pressure of the grassroots movement against the chain, and this month, its CEO was ousted. For the 243 million licensed drivers in the United States, the Chevron boycott is an important way to show solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation. It is also an incredibly urgent call: Earlier this month, Chevron and its partners announced plans for a $429 million expansion in the Leviathan natural gas field.
“Chevron is pleased to partner with the State of Israel,” Jeff Ewing, managing director of Chevron’s Eastern Mediterranean Business Unit, said in a statement to the Jerusalem Post. “We look forward to supporting the country’s strategy to develop its energy resources for the benefit of the country and the region.”
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