Israeli bank wrongly removed from UN list of settlement profiteers

A modern one-story bank building surrounded by trees — Branches of Bank Otsar Ha-Hayal prominently display the name and logo of its owner, the settlement-profiteering First International Bank of Israel. (via Who Profits)

The United Nations human rights office incorrectly removed an Israeli bank from its database of companies that facilitate Israel’s illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

The UN released a long-awaited update to the database last week, the first since the list of settlement profiteers was initially published in February 2020.

Palestinian and international human rights organizations have welcomed the update, but have been sharply critical about the UN’s failure to revise it annually as mandated by the UN Human Rights Council.

Citing budget difficulties, the UN only reviewed the 112 companies on the original 2020 database, but did not research or add any new companies that are involved in Israel’s theft and colonization of Palestinian land – a war crime.

Following the review, the UN actually removed 15 companies from the database that it says were “ceasing or were no longer involved in” supporting or profiting from the settlements.

Those companies include American food giant General Mills, which last year divested from a joint venture to manufacture its Pillsbury brand products in a settlement industrial zone. That victory was the result of a two-year campaign by Palestinian rights supporters.

But at least one Israeli firm appears to have been wrongly removed from the list of settlement profiteers.

Bank Otsar Ha-Hayal supposedly ended its provision of services and financing to Israeli settlements, according to the updated UN database.

But this is false. Otsar Ha-Hayal is wholly owned by another settlement profiteer, First International Bank of Israel.

First International – along with other major Israeli banks – remains in the UN database due to its major role in financing Israel’s settler-colonization of Palestinian land.

In 2018, First International acquired 100 percent of the shares of Bank Otsar Ha-Hayal and thus receives 100 percent of the profits from its activities.

Indeed for all practical purposes they appear to be the same bank: Clicking on the “English” link on Bank Otsar Ha-Hayal’s Hebrew website redirects to the website of First International Bank of Israel.

First International Bank of Israel describes Otsar Ha-Hayal – which means the Soldier’s Treasury in Hebrew – as merely a “brand name” that it uses to market itself to members of the Israeli military.

Branches of Otsar Ha-Hayal prominently display the name and logo of First International, underscoring that it is only a variation on the brand and not a separate bank.

That means any relationship with Bank Otsar Ha-Hayal is the same as doing business with First International Bank of Israel.

Thus removing it from the UN database is clearly wrong and should be reversed.

Need for vigilance

The UN human rights office does not provide the evidence it used to determine that the 15 companies should be removed from the database, which means that human rights defenders and ethical investors should continue to do their due diligence to verify the accuracy of the UN database.

This is especially true since 13 of the 15 companies that are supposedly no longer involved in the settlements are Israeli and may have an interest in concealing or obfuscating their settlement-related activities.

Nor does a company’s removal from the UN list of settlement profiteers – which uses fairly narrow criteria for inclusion – indicate that the firm does not aid and abet Israel’s crimes against Palestinians in myriad other ways.

Israeli construction giant Ashtrom Ltd., for instance, is another of the firms that has been taken out of the updated UN database.

But on its website Ashtrom boasts that it builds facilities for the Israeli military, including working on the army’s “training campus” in the southern Naqab region, the army’s “principal training facility.”

There can be no doubt that the base is used to prepare soldiers to enforce Israel’s shoot-to-kill and other criminal policies aimed at maintaining Israel’s military occupation and brutal system of apartheid against Palestinians.

Ashtrom is also proud to have done construction at HaSharon prison, a facility where Israel detains Palestinians from the occupied West Bank in violation of international law, including women and children in what human rights defenders have described as “cruel” and “inhumane” conditions.

“Derailed”

The UN’s apparent error over Bank Otsar Ha-Hayal underscores the concerns about the updated UN database voiced by Palestinian and international human rights organizations.

The release of the updated database is an “important step forward,” several human rights groups including Al-Haq, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, said on Tuesday.

But they were highly critical of the UN human rights office’s failure to regularly update the list as required by its mandate.

“Had the mandate been properly implemented, this year would have seen the seventh substantive report of the database, not the second,” the groups said.

That is because the UN Human Rights Council mandated the creation of the database as far back as 2016, yet it took until 2020 for the first version to appear.

The fact that some companies have ceased their complicity in the settlements since being named in 2020 “demonstrates the significant impact the database can have in encouraging and promoting compliance with international law,” the human rights groups said.

But they voiced their concern that the UN human rights office “has not undertaken the work to identify new businesses” involved in the settlements.

The groups charged that the “full implementation of the database mandate has been derailed over the years, primarily due to inadequate political will and ostensible bureaucratic obstacles.”

“These challenges have emerged within a highly pressurized environment, in which certain states have demonstrated hostility to the implementation of the mandate,” they added.