Barclays: Bankrolling genocide & apartheid

Barclays has ramped up its bankrolling of companies supplying arms to Israel by 55% since 2021 – despite Israel’s deepening apartheid and plausible genocide of the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.

Barclays now owns shares worth over £2 billion – and provides a further £6.1 billion in loans and underwriting – to nine companies supplying weapons and military technology to Israel, as revealed in our recent joint report with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign and Campaign Against Arms Trade.

Barclays is continuing to increase its investments despite it being extremely likely that these and other UK-made weapons and military technologies are being used to facilitate Israel's plausibly genocidal military assault on Gaza. 

Armed violence has always been at the heart of Israel’s apartheid and occupation regime. Palestinians already lived under threat of lethal violence from Israeli forces and settlers, arbitrary and abusive arrest and detention, home demolitions and forcible transfer, and intrusive surveillance of all areas of their lives. Since 7 October 2023, Israel has escalated all of these unlawful acts, as well as committing what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has called a ‘plausible’ genocide. 

Israel’s leaders have openly dehumanised, incited violence and overseen atrocities against Palestinians. More than 120,000 Palestinians have been killed or injured in Gaza by Israel, as of June 2024. Medical infrastructure and health workers have been repeatedly targeted, humanitarian sites and convoys struck time and time again, and the entire civilian population has been acutely starved of medicine, fuel, food and water due to Israel’s devastating blockade of Gaza, a form of collective punishment and a war crime under international law. 

The ICJ has demanded that Israel adopts provisional measures to stop its plausible genocide, as well as its military assault on Rafah, while the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israel’s leaders for war crimes.     

Israel’s decades of militarised repression and apartheid against the Palestinian people, ongoing extreme assault on Gaza, and the spike in both Israeli state and settler violence across the West Bank are made possible by international complicity. Countries including the UK provide Israel with arms and military technology, while financial institutions such as Barclays invest in and profit from the arms companies fuelling Israel’s plausible genocide and atrocities across the occupied Palestinian territory. 

These arms and military technology companies include: 

• Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest private arms company, supplies 85% of the unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) used by the Israeli army, as well as military communications technology and targeting equipment. Elbit Systems weaponry has been used extensively in Israel’s bombardments of Gaza, including the Hermes 450 drone, which in April killed seven humanitarian workers from World Central Kitchen, three of them UK nationals. Additionally, Elbit Systems has been associated with the production of cluster munitions, banned under international law. 
• Raytheon produces bunker buster bombs and other missiles for fighter jets used by Israel to repeatedly target Palestinian homes in the Gaza Strip. 
• Caterpillar supplies the Israeli military with D9 bulldozers, used to demolish Palestinian homes and essential infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and to construct Israel’s settlements, all of which are illegal, on occupied Palestinian land. 

Research published in December 2023 by the Don’t Buy into Occupation Coalition showed that Barclays is Europe’s sixth largest creditor of businesses working in Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank. 

In the 1970s and 1980s Barclays profited from the crime of apartheid in South Africa. Barclays continues to profit from apartheid today through its investments in arms companies facilitating Israel’s apartheid regime against the Palestinian people. 

Barclays ended its financial support for apartheid in South Africa thanks to the tireless efforts of activists and campaigners across the world who stood in solidarity with Black South Africans. Palestinians have called on people of conscience around the world to support their struggle for justice, including by campaigning to put an end to Barclays’ complicity in Israel’s apartheid regime. 

Throughout 2022 and 2023, thousands of people wrote to Barclays demanding that it end its complicity. Barclays carried on regardless. Now, Barclays is complicit in Israel’s plausible genocide too. It's up to us to increase the pressure and demand that Barclays stops banking on apartheid and plausible genocide once and for all.