Local Palestine campaigners urge boycott of Israeli sponsored event

Members of Rochdale Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) join fellow campaigners from Halifax Friends of Palestine and Manchester PSC outside the Bankfield textile museum in Halifax

Members of Rochdale Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) joined fellow campaigners from Halifax Friends of Palestine and Manchester PSC outside the Bankfield textile museum in Halifax on Saturday (15 September 2012).

They were protesting against Calderdale Council’s decision to host a Natural History Museum exhibition which is sponsored by the French multi-national company Veolia without also exhibiting information about Veolia’s activities in Israeli occupied Palestine.

Speakers expressed their disappointment that visitors to the exhibition are not being provided with full information about Veolia who they say actively support illegal Israeli settlements and thefts of Palestinian land as well as seeking to profit from waste disposal, street cleaning and parks maintenance contracts with local authorities in the England.

Leehee Rothschild from the organisation Boycott from Within urged all those who oppose the Israeli government’s continued oppression of the Palestinian people and its illegal occupation of Palestinian land to ensure that they do not buy Israeli goods and to oppose contracts for companies like Veolia who are complicit with the occupation.

On behalf of Rochdale PSC, Jenny Turner said: “It is completely unacceptable that The Natural History Museum is allowing a company like Veolia to buy positive publicity by allowing it to be associated with one of its exhibitions when it knows exactly what Veolia is actually doing in Palestine. They know that Veolia runs buses along road number 443 which crosses Palestinian land but which is closed to Palestinian drivers and passengers. They have been shown photographs of rubbish which has come from illegal Israeli settlements, but which is dumped by Veolia on Palestinian land, but they have still allowed one of their exhibitions to be sponsored by Veolia. This is a disgrace.”