Israel’s fossil-energy supply is among the most damaging components contributing to the genocide underway in Gaza – and to its longer-term maintenance of apartheid, including land-grab settlements in Palestine. The coal-fired power plants at Ashdod and Hedera ports typically supply 20-30% of power to a grid that feeds the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the illegal West Bank settlements.

Last December, South Africa invoked the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) after Israel began mass murder and bombings against more than two million Palestinians in Gaza in response to the Al Aqsa Flood Operation of October 7 when resistance fighters broke out from the besieged Gaza prison.

The IDF revenge – along with its ‘friendly fire’ and the ‘Hannibal Directive’ that also killed several hundred Israeli civilians near the Gaza border – is so extreme that International Criminal Court prosecutors prepared war-crimes arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention requires all statesto undertake ‘to prevent and to punish genocide’.

Court order to stop empowering Israel

The ICJ has also insisted that all States halt any “aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” That logically includes South African state aid – e.g. via Transnet rail shipments, or the depletion of a sovereign natural resource taken from Mpumalanga Province mines – in the form of coal supplies to the Israel Electric Corporation.

In situations of armed conflict, additional international humanitarian and criminal law standards apply to corporations and individual business leaders, who must consider whether their operations contribute to gross human rights violations or international crimes.

A similar vulnerability occurred within a different apartheid system, South Africa’s, in 1985 when financial sanctions (thanks to international solidarity campaigning) and internal United Democratic Front protest from below caused such a squeeze that President PW Botha declared a debt default, imposed exchange controls and shut the stock market. The response by business leaders was to visit Zambia to meet exiled African National Congress leaders, beginning the democratization process as whites finally began to accept ‘one person, one vote’ democracy.

Yet some of the same businesses that enjoyed apartheid profits, e.g. Anglo American and Glencore, went on to empower Israeli apartheid. Even after the Gaza genocide began last October, three massive ships left Richard’s Bay – the most recent on January 20 – carrying dirty coal which fuels both genocide and climate crisis.

Coal-fired genocide

The last year for which United Nations Comtrade data are available, 2021, shows 6.5 million tonnes of coal imported by Israel, of which 50% was Colombian, 36% Russian, 13% South African and 1% Turkish. (In May this year, Turkey imposed full trade sanctions on Israel.) In 2023 the amount of coal consumed by Israel was 5.2 million tonnes.

And according to a June 2024 report by SPGlobal, “Israel imported 1.4 million tonnes of thermal coal in 2024 so far… Colombia accounted for 855,700 tonnes – or 60% of all imports during this period. Other key suppliers included Russia with 247,500, South Africa at 169,200, the U.S. at 86,100 and China supplying 53,000.”  

The Boycott Divestment Sanctions ‘BDS’ strategy called for by the broadest-ever range of Palestinian civil society in 2005, draws on lessons two decades earlier in ending South African apartheid. It has now become urgent for the SA government, trade unions, community organisations, social movements and anti-coal environmentalists to mobilise and end any economic complicity with Israel’s genocide.

In the energy sector we are targeting companies that include Glencore (the main firm selling coal from Colombia) and its Astron Energy subsidiary and main coal-mining partner African Rainbow Minerals, Thungela (formerly AngloCoal) and any other South African firms as well as state owned enterprises such as Transnet that have profited from empowering Israeli apartheid.

Since South African coal has been fueling oppression of Palestine for decades, it is long overdue to bring the damage to a halt and for the guilty firms to pay reparations for past earnings, just as did Detroit-based General Motors for apartheid profiteering in pre-1994 South Africa.

Colombia’s example

On June 8, Colombian President Gustavo Petro issued a proclamation to “suspend coal exports to Israel until the genocide is stopped,” on grounds that in the context of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, coal is “an energy supply and strategic resource for the manufacturing of weapons, the mobilization of troops, and the manufacturing of supplies for military operations” – as well as being a major contributor to the climate crisis.

The Colombian Mining Association vowed to disobey Petro and in June-July the coal shipments continued, including from Glencore’s main port on June 25. But Petro has persevered and last week ruled that on Thursday August 22, those shipments must end.

Glencore ‘ethics’

While Colombia’s halt to Israel coal sales will affect 5.1% of exports, in South Africa’s case the equivalent is typically lower than 1%. Earnings from these exports fluctuate with price and quantity: $101 million in 2021; $184 million in 2022; and $78 million in 2023. 

But the costs of coal exports – in terms of local pollution, greenhouse gas damage and depleted hydrocarbons, as well as labour, operating costs and environmental remediation – are far higher than the gross income. Still, any worker or community adversely affected should be first in line for Just Energy Transition funds.

A few weeks ago, at Glencore’s Annual General Meeting in Switzerland, a shareholder asked “if you’re conducting human rights assessments on the use of the coal you’re exporting to Israel to ensure that you’re not held liable”? Board Chairman Kalidas Madhavpeddi replied, “The company supplies to many countries around the world and it’s almost impossible to tell you the answer to your question.” The shareholder followed up, “So you don’t check how the coal is being used?”

The answer revealed the firm’s lack of ethics: “Coal is used in power generation, that’s simple.” The two Glencore directors from South Africa who were there – CEO Gary Nagle and Senior Independent Director (and former SA central bank governor) Gill Marcus – were notably silent.

Glencore’s roots are in Marc Rich & Co, a firm central to apartheid-era sanctions-busting and racism-profiteering. After being renamed Glencore, the Swiss firm took a Johannesburg Stock Exchange secondary listing, in which our civil servants own 2% worth, or $1.1 billion. From 2018-22, Glencore was successfully prosecuted under the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for widespread bribery across Africa and Latin America. It paid $1.5 billion in fines, in the process revealing deep collusion with notorious Israeli tycoon Dan Gertler in central Africa.

Shir Hever, considered to be Israel’s leading progressive political economist, concludes: “If South Africa now follows in the footsteps of Colombia, it would be such a powerful move, that it could possibly bring the genocide to a halt.”

For these reasons, protests against Glencore on August 22 at its Johannesburg headquarters and subsidiary Astron’s Cape Town site – kick off South African BDS campaigning aimed at disempowering genocide.

(Rev. Boesak, a liberation theologian, was formerly SA Ambassador to the United States; Bond is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at UJ; and Dadoo coordinates the BDS Coalition in SA.)