Chevron has halted its plans to expand investment in genocidal Israel’s natural gas infrastructure. In August, Chevron announced the plan to invest $429 million in the Leviathan Natural Gas field. Those plans came to a halt during the Islamic Republic of Iran’s military attack against Israeli military and security targets on October 1st. Iran’s attack came in response to Israel and the United States’s continued genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, expanded and repeated violations of Arab sovereignty, and most immediately, Israel’s brutal invasion and terrorist attacks in Lebanon. As part of this response, Iran targeted Israel’s natural gas infrastructure including the platform of the Tamar Gas field. Now, all Israeli gas expansion projects are suspended in the country, including Chevron’s plans. As Chevron lands on its back foot, the Palestine solidarity movement in the United States and DSA must escalate our campaign against Chevron and secure their full divestment from genocide, apartheid, and occupation.
Chevron is, without question, the major player in providing Israel with energy. This makes them clearly complicit with the Zionist settler colonial project of apartheid and ethnic cleansing. Chevron operates and partially owns Tamar and Leviathan, the two largest Israeli natural gas fields, both located in the Eastern Mediterranean. As the BDS National Committee (BNC) wrote in their 2022 announcement of Chevron as a divestment target, this practice “deprives the Palestinian people of their right to sovereignty over their natural resources.” Chevron further assists Israel in violating Palestinian sovereignty through its operation and partial ownership of the Eastern Mediterranean Gas pipeline that runs from Israel to Palestine bypassing Gaza (of course without paying Palestinians the millions they’d owe in transit fees). This pipeline furthers Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza, and its “protection” by the Israeli navy has further restricted Gaza’s fishing industry to the coast.
As if this theft of resources and enforcement of illegal blockades weren’t enough, the energy produced out of Chevron’s gas fields is distributed by the state-owned Israeli Electric Company (IEC). The IEC is one of the many tools the Zionist project utilizes to subjugate the Palestinian people and reproduce apartheid conditions. This includes not just the IEC’s supplying of all electricity to the Israeli government including all military bases and prisons, but also as a larger piece of the century and a half long project of ecocide and environmental apartheid. The IEC has a long record of depriving Palestinian communities inside of Palestine from accessing the energy grid, and after 1967, took control of the Palestinian power grid in the West Bank. Further, as Israel has continuously bombed the one remaining power plant in Gaza, the IEC has become a major supplier providing as much as half of Gaza’s electricity. Finally, Chevron’s complicity generates hundreds of millions of dollars annually in tax revenue for Israel. Chevron is not just depriving Palestinians of their sovereignty, they are actively supporting and enforcing the genocide and apartheid.
Yet, with a clear, disciplined, and focused strategy targeting Chevron’s publicity and profits, a global grassroots movement can force Chevron out of Palestine. Chevron only entered the Israeli Markets in 2020 with its acquisition of Noble energy and it can exit at any time. Chevron’s departure would further isolate Israel from the international community and sends a message to the hundreds of other corporations who are currently complicity in Israel’s genocide that they are next.
In January, the BNC announced the escalation of Chevron to a consumer boycott and the development of a Palestinian-led global coalition coordinating to escalate the campaign. This call serves as a fundamental grounding to our campaign because as socialists in the heart of empire, we have a responsibility to align ourselves with the calls of the victims of US imperialism. environmental organizations in Palestine have also called for a global energy embargo. We should see the Chevron campaign as in part fulfilling this task.
The strategies called for by the BNC further offer us a path to build a mass campaign that can aid in the development of a larger and stronger Palestine solidarity movement in the United States. The Boycott Chevron campaign is modeled off of the Shell Boycott developed during the South Africa divestment movement. This was a far reaching campaign supported by a variety of organizations from trade unions, to churches to civil society groups. As part of the Boycott Shell campaign, supporters picketed gas stations gathering popular support and commitments to boycott. They handed out or sold “Discredit Cards,” a wallet-size card supporters could keep as a reminder of their commitment to boycott Shell products. Unions like the UAW printed guides explaining why to boycott Shell, its links to labor conditions for American workers, and how to get involved in the campaign. In response, major institutions like Harvard University sold their stock in Shell while local franchisees disaffiliated their gas stations from the corporation.
This is the roadmap for a transformative campaign for DSA and the Palestine solidarity movement. Our chapters across the country can picket Chevron gas stations, talk to auto-body shops that sell Chevron products, build the national boycott, launch local campaigns against Chevron sponsored events like the Houston marathon, build statewide efforts to divest pension funds like calPERS and city investments like Cuyahoga County’s, and more (use this map from the American Friends Service to see some of these investments and sponsorships!).
Because Chevron, like Shell, is a consumer facing corporation, we can develop popular support from a broad swath of workers and community members. Chevron has gas stations across large portions of the United States and many other alternatives exist. The first ask we make to almost anyone is clear: boycott Chevron and get your gas elsewhere. This first ask also clearly creates an on-ramp to strong anti-zionist political education and further campaign involvement. We can connect Chevron’s complicity in genocide right now to Zionism’s century and half long project of ecocide, or as they call it “making the desert bloom.” When someone signs a petition, we can reach out to connect with them, utilize relational organizing to have them organize their networks to sign our petition, and recruit them to DSA so we can bring them into the campaign, hosting picket lines and artbuilds and teach-ins and so much more. In polls, we have repeatedly seen popular support for an arms embargo. Chevron offers us the ideal campaign to bring these from answers on a poll to active participants in the movement and our organization.
To return to the larger analysis of our moment, targeting Chevron allows us to use our limited capacity and resources to land a major blow against the entirety of the Israeli settler colony. Energy is Israel’s weak spot and has been for many years. As Israel, like all other settler colonial and apartheid regimes, realizes it is at the beginning of its inevitable collapse, it will “unleash ferocious and uninhibited force to try to contain it.” This will invite attacks that threaten Israel’s energy infrastructure, and Chevron’s investments. A mass movement targetting Chevron’s complicity in genocide amplifies the current insecurity of Chevron’s financial assets and targets the weakspot of Israel’s war machine.
Pledge to boycott Chevron here: dsaic.org/boycottchevron, and join our campaign at dsaic.org/sfg-sign-up.