Tell HSBC to sever ties with companies selling weapons to Israel

Israel uses military force to maintain its oppression of Palestinians. It targets people with tear gas grenades, rubber-coated bullets and live ammunition, and carries out mass arrests, house demolitions and extrajudicial executions.

This brutality lies at the heart of Israel’s systematic violations of Palestinian rights, amounting to serious breaches of international law, and even war crimes. Against incredible odds, Palestinians continue to resist this oppression, demanding their rights to freedom, justice and self-determination.

Palestinian civil society has made clear what we here in the UK can do to support their struggle for justice: work to stop UK corporations from supporting and profiting from Israel’s system of oppression. We need to pressure HSBC to sever ties with companies selling weapons to Israel, and to stop supporting and profiting from Israel's violations against Palestinians' human rights. Feel in the information below and send an email to the HSBC's CEO.

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Dear Mr Flint,
HSBC must end its business relationships with Elbit Systems, and all other companies selling weapons and military technology to Israel, used in the oppression of Palestinians.
It has come to my attention that HSBC holds shares in Elbit Systems, which manufactures and supplies the Israeli military with drones, used regularly in attacks on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was recently revealed that Elbit drone Hermes 450 was part of an attack in 2014 in which four Palestinian children were killed on a beach in the Gaza Strip while playing football. Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, especially in the context of its 2014 war and 2018 repression of the Great Return March, have been identified as grave human rights abuse and war crimes by international human rights experts, including the United Nations.
Elbit Systems also has produced the internationally banned chemical weapon ‘white phosphorous’, which Human Rights Watch revealed was used by Israel in attacks on Palestinian in 2009. Elbit Systems produced canons for cluster munitions, subject to an international ban, which it has sold to the Israeli military as recently as 2017. Israel’s heavy use of cluster munitions is still causing devastation and destruction in Lebanon, where they were used in copious amounts in 2006.
War on Want’s research report ‘Deadly Investments’ revealed that HSBC held £3.6million of shares in Elbit Systems in 2017. This is a contradiction with HSBC’s own policy on cluster munitions, as outlined in the Defence Equipment Sector Policy. It is also a contravention of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which explicitly state that companies have a responsibility to take active steps to avoid causing or contributing to adverse human rights impact. The UN OHCHR has clarified that this applies to banks’ business relationships as well as their own activities.
Elbit Systems is just one of many companies, complicit in human rights abuse, that is able to use its relationship with HSBC as a legitimating cover for its contribution to war crimes. As you well know, people around the UK have been holding pickets at HSBC branches to protest this complicity, and these protests are bound to grow until HSBC takes a stand against human rights abuse by divesting from Elbit Systems and other companies supplying weapons to Israel.

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Tell HSBC to sever ties with companies selling weapons to Israel