Patrick Harvie and the Scottish Greens have been branded "racist" over an attempt to ban products from Israel from being sold in the Holyrood canteen. The MSP is asking the parliament's corporate body to consider removing items from sale which are linked to companies who operate in "illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory."
Pro-Palestine groups have called for a boycott for various products allegedly related to the conflict in Gaza, including Coca-Cola and McDonalds. The Glasgow Film Festival bowed down to pressure from unions to halt the sale of Coke products during their events because they operate in Atarot, an illegal Israeli settlement.
And now Mr Harvie is taking the fight to Holyrood by urging officials to not sell items linked to a list created by the UN Human Rights Office as being involved in activities related to illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. He wants the corporate body to remove them from its catering outlets, which includes a canteen, members restaurant and a pub.
This list includes 97 companies like Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia Group and Motorola Solutions. About 600,000 Jews live in about 140 settlements built since Israel's occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1967. The settlements are widely considered illegal under international law, though Israel has always disputed this.
Israeli campaigners slammed Mr Harvie and the Scottish Greens for his attempts to force Holyrood to boycott certain products. The Corporate Body would decide whether or not to go ahead with his plans, with this committee including the Presiding Officer, a Tory, a SNP MSP, a Labour MSP and Maggie Chapman from the Greens.
Jonathan Turner, Chief Executive of UK Lawyers for Israel, claimed that "banning products because they are made by companies on the list produced by the UN Human Rights Office would contravene procurement legislation and equality legislation in force in Scotland, in particular the Public Contracts (Scotland) Regulations 2015, the UK Procurement Act 2023 and the UK Equality Act 2010."
He added: "As the UN Human Rights Office has itself made clear, inclusion on its list is not a finding that the company is violating any human rights. On the contrary, many companies operating in the West Bank help Palestinians by providing well-paid jobs, or goods and services which Palestinians need and want.
"Even if a company on the UN list is violating Palestinian human rights in some way, this is unlikely to justify exclusion from procurement in accordance with the procurement legislation, and the UK company supplying the food is likely to be a different subsidiary to the company operating in the West Bank.
"Furthermore, many leading companies operate in occupied territories such as Western Sahara and Northern Cyprus or in countries where there have been much more serious violations of human rights. Targeting Israel reflects a racist approach which contravenes the equality legislation."
Sammy Stein, Chairman of the Glasgow Friends of Israel, told the Scottish Daily Express: “I'm not surprised the Scottish Greens coming up with this demand because as a political party, not only do they support BDS, which is the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement, which was established originally to destroy the State of Israel, they're also still going on about Israel committing genocide in Gaza, even though the ICJ have not actually decided that that's what's happened, and yet they're still claiming that.
“It's just another example of a political party being completely blind and unreasonable about what's happening in the Middle East and trying to persuade people that their ways the right way, when, of course, it actually isn't.
“I'm not surprised at the Scottish Greens doing this because they've always shown a great antipathy towards Israel, and they're completely ignorant about what's happening in the Middle East, and this is why they come out with these absurd, absurd demands and policies.”
A spokesman for the Scottish Greens responded: "The Scottish Greens will never support collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, apartheid or genocide, or the companies who are complicit in it. The atrocities being inflicted by Israeli forces have killed tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza and created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world."
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