Pipeline to Genocide

Published by Shado Mag and the Transnational Institute on 9 September 2024. 

Over the past 10 months, we have borne witness to the most televised and evidenced genocide in human history. Israel’s military jets and vehicles have been live streamed razing to the ground all infrastructure that makes life possible in Gaza – from schools to hospitals, and even the desecration of cemeteries.

But, these forces of destruction do not appear spontaneously. They are fitted with parts from arms factories around the world, and fuelled with oil from global reservoirs. 

And so, it becomes paramount to follow the energy supply chains from the point of extraction to their point of use in Israeli military vehicles. If we understand that “[weapons manufacturers] are the fists of US imperialism, just as logistics companies are its sinews,” then energy corporations provide this death machine its oxygen. 

BP gas licences

Israel receives this oxygen from a diversity of sources. In November 2023, news broke that a number of Western energy companies, including British Petroleum (BP), were granted gas exploration licences in occupied Palestinian waters by the Israeli Ministry of Energy. While it will take years before these sites are converted into reliable sources of gas, activist groups in the US and Britain have protested these business deals, brokered in the shadow of an ongoing genocide. 

The motivation for Israel’s genocidal, Western-backed siege on Gaza cannot be reduced to the exploitation of its marine gas fields. The ongoing genocide should be understood as part of the logic of US imperialism and its proxy state which enacts its interests in the region: the Zionist settler colonial project, which seeks to ethnically cleanse all of historic Palestine, seize natural resources, and use and export its fuel supplies for the consolidation of its military and economic power.  

Indeed, our protests against BP’s gas licences are not in isolation. Like other activist groups in Turkey and Colombia, we campaign against energy companies partnering with Israeli businesses to supply fuel to Israel. 

For this reason, we situate BP’s gas licence within its larger role in fuelling Israel. BP is the operator and largest shareholder of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline, which is supplying Israel with 28% of its oil during its genocide.

In this investigation we explore BP’s colonial history and the supply chain of the BTC pipeline. We also delve into the social licences that facilitate BP’s operations abroad. Social licences are a commercial and metaphorical concept describing corporations' process of acquiring public approval as an added layer of legitimacy for their ongoing profit-driven, colonial business practices. 

Focusing on the BTC pipeline reveals how Zionist settler-colonialism is central to the continued extraction of oil in the Middle East, and global uneven accumulation, where wealth is concentrated in the Global North.

The liberation of Palestine and regional anti-Zionist resistance must therefore be central to the larger struggle against capitalism and for a just transition. Organising from the imperial core against the Zionist occupation of Palestine then becomes about much more than just holding the perpetrators of genocide to account. It is part of the bigger fight against imperialism – which exterminates populations and ecologies for the continued flow of value to the Global North.