Energy Embargo for Palestine blockade the entrance into the British Museum on 24 March, 2024. Photo credits: Energy Embargo for Palestine

Interview with Energy Embargo for Palestine

On 11 February, Energy Embargo for Palestine (EEfP) made their first public action by occupying the British Museum in protest against its 10-year deal with British Petroleum, launching the #BoycottBritishMuseum campaign. The group is forging vital links between the climate movement and the Palestine solidarity movement. rs21 interviewed the group to understand more about their political trajectory and the significance of their call for a total energy embargo against Israeli energy. 

rs21: Preceding October 2023 many different Palestine solidarity and activist groups existed in the UK. Since October their rate of actions have increased hugely, and we have also seen the development of completely new groups. Some of these groups are dedicated to Palestine solidarity in general, focusing on building awareness and fundraising, others are single-issue focused, for example Palestine Action’s targeted campaign against Elbit Systems, and others like Sisters Uncut come from a broader background of activism that is currently focusing on Palestine. It would be interesting to know how Energy Embargo for Palestine emerged out of this landscape, and whether the founders had a particular trajectory that led to the group focusing on the question of an energy embargo. 

EEfP: Our campaign emerged partly out of frustration in the wake of Israel’s genocidal siege on Gaza, recognising that there were significant gaps in how the climate movement in Britain was situating itself in relation to Palestine solidarity organising, despite all the resources, people and influence at its disposal which it could offer the wider struggle.

Back in October, several notable climate groups refused to sign an open letter which condemned the Zionist settler-colonial project. This letter called for “principled solidarity with Palestine that connects climate justice with the struggles of colonised peoples worldwide.” From what we observed, this refusal stemmed from a lack of principled anti-imperialist politics to guide their analysis of climate justice and respective campaigns. 

As organisers that have always viewed our Palestine solidarity activism central to climate justice, we recognised the urgency to make clear the intersections between the forces of global capital, imperialism, Zionism, and environmental destruction. While existing climate groups and divestment campaigns had targeted various energy companies for their carbon crimes and violation of human rights for the pursuit of profit, they had largely been silent on these companies’ role in fuelling Zionist settler-colonialism, both before and after 7 October.  

Since the wake of the genocide, Palestinian groups issued a call to disrupt energy flow to Israel and the global energy market, and we responded to this by taking up responsibility to target energy companies such as BP to force Britain to end its complicity with the genocide, the siege on Gaza, and the Zionist settler-colonial project. Our campaign emerged out of this collective recognition that energy and the capital it generates links the survival of global imperialism and capital to the survival of the Israeli war machine – as shown through the example of Israel granting gas licences to BP off the coast of Gaza.

From the role that energy plays in powering domestic arms production, to how it fuels imperialist militarisation that murders and displaces Palestinians – we have a duty in the imperial core to strike it from wherever we can. 

Moreover, energy (and in particular its restriction) has been another avenue in which Israel is waging genocide on Palestinians: since Israel began its siege on Gaza 17 years ago, they have consistently limited fuel access; and since October, Israel has completely cut off Gaza’s supply of food, water, and fuel – totally incapacitating the health infrastructure through fuel restriction in addition to bombing and invading hospitals. 

Just as we target arms factories to disrupt the weapons supply chain to Israel, we must also target energy flows that continue to enrich the Zionist state and its colonial corporate collaborators off the backs of Palestinians struggling for freedom. 

rs21: It would be good to know a bit more about the history of energy embargoes that you have developed your ideas out of, and how they have been used historically to pressurise different regimes across the world. Have these ever been started at a grassroots level or have they typically been state-led initiatives? 

EEfP: Our campaign takes inspiration from the historic grassroots embargoes which were used as a tool to isolate colonial states by disrupting trade flows of arms and energy. For example, the Anti-Apartheid Movement against Rhodesian and South African Apartheid states notably targeted BP and Shell’s complicity in fuelling colonial police and military forces, trading oil, and upholding white minority rule. 

That being said, we recognise that when most people hear the word ‘embargo’, they may think of the sanctions and embargoes placed by Western states against countries, such as Cuba and Venezuela, that have dared to resist the will of US imperialism. 

However, our understanding of an embargo is rooted in a history of grassroots and popular calls, made by workers and anti-colonial activists. We know that governments rarely make political decisions based on a sense of morality and are instead driven and influenced by their material interests. This is why we target energy markets – to put direct political pressure on the British establishment in the run up to elections, to threaten their business interests, and to directly disrupt imperialist militarisation – forcing them to end their complicity with the genocide through the targeting of global capital. It is in this way that we intend to spark an anti-imperialist embargo for Palestine from below. 

rs21: Some aspects of the climate movement have struggled to make links between environmentalism, anti-colonialism and anti-capitalism. More recently we have seen a growing emphasis on climate reparations for the global south which is a key mover in recognising the links between these ideas. Has the specific intersection between climate struggle and Palestinian liberation been made before by activist groups, as a central focus of their demands? Has the climate movement previously engaged with the Palestine solidarity movement? 

Our work to centre Palestinian liberation as the compass of the climate justice struggle is by no means unprecedented. These links have been made before by activist groups and people resisting colonialism internationally.

Sumud, the Arabic word for steadfastness, speaks to how Palestinians continually resist Israel’s attempts at dispossession and erasure of their land, culture, and identity. In a chapter of Dismantling Green Colonialism, Manal Shqair introduces the concept of eco-sumud as a form of resistance, and how it is a practice ‘ingrained in a belief in the possibility of defeating Israeli settler colonialism, and in the invincibility of the burning desire of the colonised to determine their own destiny.’ Rafeef Ziadah has notably said that Palestinians teach us life; it is through the practice of eco-sumud that Palestinians teach us that anticolonial resistance is central to any politics of climate justice.

Activist groups in the Global North, notably those led by indigenous people, have also long organised around climate justice and anticolonial demands. Stop Cop City in Atlanta is a movement that has made the link between the expansion of the racist police system, the colonial plunder of indigenous lands, and ecological destruction. It has mobilised to stop the construction of a police military facility on stolen Muscogee forests. And in 2016, the #NoDAPL protests, led by indigenous activists, protested the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a crude oil pipeline whose construction would poison the water supply of indigenous communities. 

The heavy militarised response by the US law enforcement to both these movements is an indication of how imperialism depends upon the suppression of indigenous anticolonial resistance and unimpeded destruction to our ecosystems. And therefore it is no surprise that Palestinians, resisting the genocidal Zionist settler colonial entity, have forged connections with both these movements.

Most recently, the Palestinian-led Global Energy Embargo for Palestine coalition also calls on workers, environmental and activist groups internationally to demand an energy embargo against Israel to pressure it to end its genocide against the Palestinian people. They have called for the disruption of jet fuel particularly and worked with activist groups in Colombia and Turkey. As an anti-imperialist climate campaign based in Britain, we are heeding their call. 

rs21: Your first target was the British Museum, can you tell us a bit about why you chose this site? What did you learn from doing this action? 

EEfP: One of the key pillars of our strategy is to apply pressure on institutions who have partnerships with energy companies complicit in Israel’s settler colonial project. The focus on institutional partnerships comes out of our aim to isolate energy companies and target multiple pressure points. 

The British Museum has long been a major recipient of BP’s funding, and has once again announced a 10-year £50 million partnership with BP to “help deliver the museum’s redevelopment masterplan.” In effect, the British Museum is profiteering from BP’s complicity in Israeli colonial genocide. 

When we protest the BP contract, we are not appealing to the conscience of the British Museum – as we know it is built on the dispossession and looting of colonised people across the world. Instead, when we protest, we enact a politics of collective refusal – refusing to allow institutions at home to profit from a colonial genocide by taking money from and legitimising a climate colonial criminal responsible for vast ecological destruction.

We have targeted the British Museum with two protests so far — once on 11 February and once on 24 March — in addition to our recently launched #BoycottBritishMuseum campaign. We have made it clear to visitors and members that BP cannot be allowed to “greenwash” its colonial crimes by creating an “Energy Centre” in the Museum focused on a low-carbon transition. The museum’s pledges for incremental steps towards a “low carbon transition” are meaningless gestures. While over 200 historical and cultural sites in Gaza have been destroyed and hundreds of Palestinian academics, poets, and artists have been murdered, the British Museum has doubled down on its commitment to colonial interests: through partnering with BP but also loaning artefacts to the Zionist entity in its genocidal war on Palestinian heritage and existence. 

The British Museum has faced over a decade of protests from campaigns like BP Or Not BP for its pre-existing partnership with the oil giant. Although police have been called for previous actions, it is significant that as we targeted the institution specifically for their complicity in Israel’s genocide, they temporarily shut down the museum and immediately contacted the police. On 24 March, the British Museum once again collaborated with the Met Police to prevent the entire public from entering the museum in the afternoon. 

The heavy-handed response by the Museum to both our actions demonstrates their alignment with imperialism and their willingness to assist the governments’ crackdown on pro-Palestinian dissent. Despite all its grandstanding about being an allegedly public institution and respecting the right of protest, it is abundantly clear that the British Museum, just like the Met Police, is an arm of the counterinsurgent British imperialist state that (literally) shuts down at the very mention of anticolonial politics. 

For us, these actions demonstrate the power of principled anti-imperialist messaging in our climate movements and the importance of our intervention. We have not aimed for arrests (and no one has been arrested at either action), but the fact that our campaign in particular has evoked this level of securitisation and repression from the British Museum proves that we are hitting a nerve. 

We will not stop targeting the British Museum until they end their partnership with BP. And then, we will target every single one of BP’s partnerships until its colonial looting and presence in the Red Sea ceases.

rs21: How did you go about doing your research on energy supply chains? Is the research you’ve done been made publicly available, say for example on your website so that other groups could pick up some targets? 

EEfP: Much of our research builds upon the incredible work already being done and made accessible by groups like Disrupt Power, We Smell Gas, and Oil Change International, which look into how transnational energy flows fuel the Zionist war machine. 

As we grow and consolidate our campaign, we are focusing our research on energy companies based in Britain, their institutional partnerships in Britain, and their links to the Zionist settler economy. We are raising money to fund this research and appreciate any and all funds!

rs21: Are there plans on how to involve activists not in London, such as setting up branches elsewhere or making your research publicly available so it’s possible for replica actions to take place across the UK? 

As a recently launched campaign, we are currently building up our campaigning and organising power in the immediate term and focusing on defining our strategy and targets in Britain.

However, we know how crucial it is to adopt an internationalist approach. For example, comrades in the Bay Area in California are targeting Chevron for its role in fuelling the Zionist war machine. As such, we are building relationships with groups around the world seeking to put pressure on energy companies complicit in the colonial genocide of the Palestinian people and heeding the call from Palestinians to enact a global energy embargo. 

We know we are not starting from scratch: we seek to build upon the work of groups that have come before us and work closely with groups actively organising against the same targets as us, with the aim of strengthening our collective effort to build an energy embargo for Palestine from below. 

rs21: You’ve made a call for a total energy embargo against Israeli energy, what does this mean in practical terms for the Palestine Solidarity movement in Britain?

As our campaign has taken shape, we have identified a key distinction between calling for an Energy Embargo for Palestine as opposed to an Energy Embargo against Israel. We conceive of the Israeli apartheid regime as being intrinsically linked to the forces of world imperialism and global capital, and recognise that different transnational actors stand in relation to one another to maintain the Zionist settler colonial project – through normalisation, fuelling the Zionist military and economy, and looting Palestinian resources. 

For this reason, we are against all imperialist energy, not just Israeli energy, because we know that the energy companies profiting from Israel’s colonial genocide on Palestinians are the same energy companies wreaking climate catastrophe everywhere and also recording sky-high profits in the midst of a cost of living crisis. 

As far as we know, Britain does not export much energy to Israel nor import much Israeli energy. Our campaign focuses on the Global Energy Embargo for Palestine’s latter two calls to action – applying pressure on Western energy companies that invest and partner with Israeli energy companies to cut all ties with the settler state, and applying pressure on institutions from other industries to end partnerships with these energy companies. 

As Palestine solidarity activists in the Global North, it is our responsibility to disrupt the Zionist war machine on all its fronts: the arms companies which provide its weapons, the banks which insure its settler colonial project, the tech companies which provide its carceral surveillance infrastructure, the tourism which profits from the annexation of Palestinian lands, and the energy companies which fuel and profit from Israel’s political economy.

These institutions are embedded in every facet of life in Britain, from the House of Commons, to our local councils’ pension funds, to our universities, to our cultural institutions. There can be no business for companies complicit in and profiting from the dispossession and mass killing of Palestinians, and the solidarity movement in Britain needs to target these companies with a strong principled anti-imperialist grounding.