Cardiff Council has £111m invested in companies complicit in Israel’s genocide

A petition has been launched by Cardiff Palestine Solidarity Campaign to call on Cardiff Council to divest from companies complicit in Israel’s criminal activity against the Palestinian people. The objective is to encourage those companies to cut their support for the apartheid Israel regime and its 14-month-long genocidal war.

The Cardiff and Vale Council Pension Fund invests £111m in companies actively linked to Israel’s illegal war against Palestinians and its illegal occupation of Palestinian land in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank. Targetting civilians, starving them, stealing their land, and forcibly displacing a whole population are all illegal under international law.

Now, everyone living or working in Cardiff can express their view by signing the petition that will be put before city councillors in January for them to act in a simple but effective way. Sign here.

The human cost of Israel’s war against Palestine

• In July 2024, The Lancet estimated that the total number of Palestinian deaths due to Israel in the previous nine months had reached 186,000.
• At least 42,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since Oct 2023, of which over 17,000 were children.
• Israel uses starvation as a weapon of war.
• There has been the forced displacement of 1.9 million people in Gaza (total population is 2.2 million), meeting the definition of ethnic cleansing.
• Healthcare dismantled in Gaza and “all the components of a society have been destroyed”.
• More bombs have been dropped on Gaza in 13 months than the US dropped on Vietnam in its 20-year war in the 1960s/70s; or the equivalent of eight Hiroshima bombs.

Israel’s actions are illegal

• In July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled as illegal all Israeli seizing of Palestinian territory since 1967, and that it has no right to sovereignty over the occupied territory.
• The ICJ has previously ruled in 2024 that it is plausible that Israel is committing genocidal acts in its assault on Gaza, and is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
• The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has applied for arrest warrants against senior Israeli leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
• Apartheid legislation racially discriminating against non-Jewish citizens has been progressively enacted since 2009, including segregation, forced dispossession, unjust military law and restrictions on freedom of movement.

What has this got to do with Cardiff Council?

Every democratic representative body has an interest in abiding by the rules based international order for resolving conflict – otherwise the bullies always win. There is a duty on everyone to play a part in echoing and amplifying the daily pleas from Palestinians:

• for an end to the war, and
• for a just outcome to years of illegal expulsions and the occupation of Palestinian land

Cardiff Council can make a simple switch of the 3.5% of its total pension fund pot to companies not on the list of those complicit with the Israeli regime. This a call from Palestinian civil society: including the Federation of Trade Unions, political parties, NGOs, Palestinian women, refugee and cultural organisations, and many others.

Featured image via the Canary