16 Aug 2024

Scotland must end support for companies profiting from atrocities in West Bank

 

First Minister,

Thank you for your letter dated 5th June 2024 and your recent response to Patrick’s question on public grants & support for companies complicit with Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and their ongoing assault on Gaza.

In November your predecessor Humza Yousaf agreed in principle to our proposed ban on eligibility for public grants and contracts here in Scotland for the then ninety seven companies identified by the United Nations as complicit in Israel’s illegal occupation and settlements in the West Bank. Mr Yousaf rightly stated that no company profiting from occupation should profit here in Scotland too. Since then however, the Scottish Government has taken no action. That is despite repeated correspondence and a meeting eventually being arranged between Ross and the relevant Minister and officials, as you highlighted in your correspondence. Potential specific actions were identified at this meeting.

We appreciate your commitment to look into the issues we have raised - and the (surmountable) legal restrictions that the Government faces - but you will understand our frustration given that your predecessor made the same commitment ten months ago. The Government has already considered our proposals and acknowledged that progress would be possible on grants in particular, yet no action has been taken.

We are deeply concerned that, concurrent to this inaction, your Cabinet Secretary for External Affairs met with Israel’s deputy ambassador to the UK to discuss ‘mutual interests’ including energy and culture. It is impossible to envisage a similar meeting taking place with representatives of the Russian or Syrian regimes and yet the Scottish Government has apparently seen fit to build closer ties with an apartheid state as it commits genocide against the Palestinian people.

This meeting came after the International Court of Justice ruling which found that Israel is committing crimes including apartheid and illegal occupation and long after the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor began seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes committed against the people of Gaza. 

Relevant to our proposal, the ICJ ruled that Israel should stop settlement activity in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem and end its illegal occupation of those areas and the Gaza Strip as soon as possible. It is incumbent on the Scottish Government to ensure that it is not complicit in this occupation, an objective which can be most effectively achieved through our proposed ban on complicit companies.

You rightly took a swift and strong stance against support for any company still trading with Russia after its 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Through that policy the Government has proven that it is possible to take serious and meaningful action within devolved competencies in a broadly comparable situation.

Since October 7th - and ten months after we first made these proposals - at least forty thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, including at least thirteen thousand children. More than a thousand have been killed by Israeli soldiers and terrorist ‘settlers’ in the West Bank.

We acknowledge the considerable legal challenges to excluding the companies listed by the UN from bidding for public procurement contracts, but their exclusion from grant funding and other support from public bodies could be implemented today by ministerial directive. We urge you to issue that directive immediately.

Further to this, at First Minister's Questions on the 30th May, Patrick highlighted that the Scottish Government continues to financially support several arms companies via Scottish Enterprise, with funding provided since Israel launched its vicious assault on Gaza following the heinous Hamas attack on October 7th.

BAE Systems, Raytheon and Leonardo have all received funding from Scotland’s public purse. Each of these companies manufactures components used by Israeli military forces. BAE in particular, was paid a grant worth £360,000 on 4th April, after the then-First Minister wrote to the UK Government to call for an end to UK arms sales to Israel.

Whilst, as you point out, Scottish Government grants do not directly support the development of munitions or weaponry, there is no meaningful moral distinction between funding an arms company for other purposes such as research & development, marketing or to expand its facilities and the direct funding of the manufacture of weapons currently being used against the people of Gaza.

In February Humza Yousaf said he was ‘happy to look into’ halting grants to arms companies supplying Israel. Those grants have clearly continued. It is inexplicable that at the same time as you have rightly called for an end to arms sales, the SNP continues to fund the companies manufacturing those arms.

We urge you to reconsider this policy and to issue a further ministerial directive immediately halting all discretionary support to arms companies by devolved public bodies. Scotland must stand against Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza, not be complicit in it.

Ross Greer MSP and Patrick Harvie MSP.