Ted Franklin
AS ISRAEL’S WAR machine and famine stalk the people of Gaza, resistance to the war in the United States is taking new forms including a growing boycott and divestment campaign against key corporations complicit in the unfolding genocide.
Chevron Corporation, long a villain in the eyes of global climate and environmental activists, has entered the spotlight as a major focus of BDS organizing in support of the Palestinian people.
Chevron earned its billing as a top-tier target of the Palestinian-led BDS Movement by pumping gas – lots of it. Off the coast of Palestine, in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, there are vast reserves of fossil gas. Since 2020, the U.S.-based energy giant has operated the two major Israeli-claimed fossil gas fields – Tamar and Leviathan.
Israel’s war machine couldn’t run without the gas supplied by Chevron. As Israel bombs hospitals, homes, universities, and UN schools in Gaza, the gas Chevron pumps from the depths of the sea feeds onshore power generation plants that produce most of Israel’s electricity. Without Chevron’s contributions, the lights would go out on Israel’s military, police stations, and illegal settlements. Beyond generating power, Chevron also pumps millions of dollars in tax revenues to Israeli government coffers, over $462 million in 2022.
In January 2024, the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC) — the largest coalition in Palestinian civil society — called for an escalating global campaign targeting Chevron.
“We are not asking for charity, but for solidarity,” explains Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the BNC in 2005 and recipient of the Gandhi Peace Award in 2017. “We’re demanding an end to complicity. As the struggle that ended apartheid in South Africa has shown, ending state, corporate, and institutional complicity in Israel’s regime of oppression, especially through the nonviolent tactics of BDS, is the most effective form of solidarity with our liberation struggle.”
The BDS movement first called for divestment from Chevron in 2020 when Chevron took over from Noble Energy as the primary owner and operator of Israel’s gas fields. The Chevron campaign is now expanding to engage with the broader public by mounting a consumer boycott of Chevron gas stations, including those operating under the brand names Texaco and Caltex.
The BDS movement’s targeting of Chevron is based on a strategic analysis of how to organize a boycott to have a meaningful impact on corporations complicit in the suffering of Palestinians.
“The BDS movement uses the historically successful method of targeted boycotts inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, the US Civil Rights movement, the Indian anti-colonial struggle, among others worldwide,” the BNC explains. “We must strategically focus on a relatively smaller number of carefully selected companies that play a clear and direct role in Israel’s crimes and where there is a real potential for winning.”
Spontaneous campaigns aimed at Starbucks and McDonald’s have attracted popular support, but they don’t make the BNC’s targeted list. Apartheid can thrive without Ventis and Big Macs. It can’t run without gas. Going after every complicit company runs the risk of making no impression on any of them. While expressing appreciation for those who feel compelled to boycott all products and services of companies tied in any way to Israel, the BDS movement argues for a https://bdsmovement.net/news/criteria-choosing-optimal-bds-targetmore targeted approach.
Cross-Movement Synergy: Against Apartheid and Environmental Devastation
But there is another strategic consideration that supports the BDS Movement’s focus on Chevron. The Palestinian-led BDS Movement believes the Chevron Boycott has the potential to generate cross-movement synergy between the Palestine solidarity movement and environmental movements based on a shared appreciation of the devastating ecological and climate impacts of Israel’s war on Gaza.
In building any campaign, the opportunity to unite different forces against a common adversary is a major strategic advantage. Chevron is already in the crosshairs of the climate and environmental justice movements which are actively fighting to rein in the fossil fuel industry and aiming, eventually, to shut it down. Israel’s war is also destroying the climate and adding a new chapter to the fossil fuel industry’s history of ecological destruction.
“In Gaza, Israel is not only committing a genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians. It is also committing what international law experts call domicide – the mass destruction of homes and living conditions to make our territory uninhabitable – and ecocide. Though the full extent of the damage caused to the environment by Israel’s relentless bombardment and destruction in Gaza has not yet been documented, satellite imagery already showed the destruction of about 38 to 48% of tree cover and farmland.”
As the Guardian reported nearly a year ago, “Palestinian olive groves and farms have been reduced to packed earth. Soil and groundwater have been contaminated by munitions and toxins. The sea is choked with sewage and waste, the air polluted by smoke and particulate matter.”
To make matters worse, “Palestinians living under Israel’s colonial rule, with no control over our land or natural resources, are highly vulnerable to the climate crisis,” Barghouti explains. “With Israel monopolizing resources, destroying our agricultural land, denying access to water, rising temperatures are exacerbating desertification as well as water and land scarcity, entrenching climate apartheid.
“We’re building a global intersectional Boycott Chevron campaign in partnership with the climate justice movement and Indigenous peoples around the world, including in Ecuador, who are exposing and resisting the colonial violence of Chevron’s extractivism, environmental destruction, and grave human rights violations,” says BNC’s Barghouti.
Chevron holds the record as the world’s leading historical producer of greenhouse gas emissions among investor-owned oil companies. A 2021 report on Chevron’s global record of ecocide, genocide, and corruption exposed Chevron’s “severe abuse of Indigenous people, as well as massive destruction of local environments while forcing the world into a crisis from fossil-fuel induced climate change.”
#BoycottChevron Gets Underway
US organizations ranging from the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have taken up the BNC’s call to organize around the Chevron Boycott. The Quaker action group AFSC has played a leading role, providing an extensive toolkit for organizers. The resources on AFSC’s website include designs for stickers, banners, and flyers that can be adapted by local campaigns and a Fact Sheet: Chevron Fuels Israeli Apartheid and War Crimes.
Since the launch of the BDS Movement’s Boycott Chevron campaign, the BNC reports that “tens of thousands of consumers have taken the pledge to boycott Chevron gas stations, dozens of groups around the world have led pickets at Chevron, Caltex, and Texaco gas stations, and at least 3 cities have divested from Chevron.”
In February 2024, hundreds of protesters staged a “Chevron Out of Palestine” rally outside the gates of Chevron’s Richmond refinery, one of the largest refineries in California. The participants and endorsers of the rally included such diverse groups as the Oil & Gas Action Network, East Bay DSA, Idle No More, Bay Area Palestine Solidarity, Labor Rise Climate Jobs Action Group, Common Humanity Collective, Sunrise Movement, 1000 Grandmothers, Rich City Rays, Rising Tide, Coalition Against Chevron in Myanmar, San Francisco Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Palestinian Feminist Collective, Bay Area Health Workers for Palestine, Muslim Writers Collective, Amazon Watch, California Trade Justice Coalition, and Jewish Voice for Peace.
In August 2024, a similarly broad coalition of organizations in Los Angeles, dedicated to Palestinian human rights and to addressing the global climate crisis, demonstrated at the Chevron Refinery in El Segundo, just south of the LA airport. The LA coalition included Black Lives Matter, Code Pink, Extinction Rebellion, Veterans for Peace, White People 4 Black Lives, Queers 4 Palestine, Youth Climate Strike, SoCal 350 Climate Action, and local chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine.
The Los Angeles coalition addressed the following demands to Chevron’s top brass:
1) Discontinue all financial contracts and relations with the state of Israel;
2) Compensate Palestinians for any losses resulting from the extraction of gas reserves off the Gaza Strip;
3) Develop and carry out a plan to convert all Chevron operations to producing renewable energy, compensate all past victims of climate disasters, and end all fossil fuel operations worldwide; and
4) Provide full funding for a just transition of Chevron’s labor force into well-paid, unionized jobs in renewable energy and/or jobs with sustainable outcomes.
Demonstrations at the refinery gates have served a useful purpose in uniting different social movements in common cause, but the isolated locations of the refineries has meant that the actions reached few members of the public directly. That is changing as the emphasis shifts to picketing at gas stations to promote the consumer boycott.
Chevron has over 7,000 gas stations operating under the brand names Chevron, Texaco, and Caltex. The stations are scattered across 21 US states with the largest concentrations in California, Texas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Washington, Louisiana, Arizona, Oregon, Nevada. Hundreds of the stations are corporate-owned but the majority are owned by franchisees who are locked into long-term relationships with Chevron.
In September 2024, climate justice groups and human rights activists with the #BoycottChevron campaign held 15 public events in the U.S. and around the world as part of a week of action targeting Chevron. Protesters decorated Chevron’s headquarters in San Ramon, California, with a large banner declaring Chevron “the genocide energy company.” Demonstrators at gas stations asked vehicle owners to gas up elsewhere and Chevron franchise owners to sign a letter asking Chevron to divest from Israel and post in their window a notice that they have asked Chevron to do so. Franchisees who sign on will not be picketed.
As part of the September week of action, the DSA International Committee launched DSA’s own #StopFuelingGenocide campaign, calling on DSA chapters across the country to build the Chevron Boycott. In recent months, California DSAers organized demonstrations at gas stations in Oakland and San Diego and Texas DSAers staged actions in Houston and Austin.
Next Steps
#BoycottChevron forces around the country are making plans for a weekend of action timed to coincide with Chevron’s announcement of its latest quarterly earnings.
Boycott organizers recognize that it will take a global movement to persuade Chevron to end its business in Israel, much less to end its production of fossil fuels. The BDS Movement is deeply committed to nonviolence, but Chevron could find its assets off the coast of Palestine facing risks beyond the reputational injury and economic pressure the BDS Movement brings to bear. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth acknowledged in a sit-down interview sponsored by the ruling class think tank Atlantic Council that Chevron’s gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean are operating in a war zone.
Forcing Chevron to end its business in Israel will be a challenge, but #BoycottChevron activists believe victory is possible.
“Chevron only began investments in Israeli apartheid markets in 2020,” DSA campaign leaders explained in their orientation for boycott organizers. “Our task is to make it easier and more profitable for Chevron to divest from its assets in Israel than to continue holding on to them. Chevron can choose to sell off this investment at any time. We can win.”