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HR body urges US company to halt bulldozer sales to Israel

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: Human Rights Watch, the New York-based group, has urged Caterpillar, the American manufacturer of heavy equipment and earth-moving machinery, to stop the sale of D9 bulldozers to Israel since they are used to demolish the homes of Palestinians.

The human rights group has pointed out that this equipment is being used by Israel to violate international humanitarian law in the occupied territories. The demand coincides with an announcement by the Jewish Voice for Peace, a San Francisco group, that it had filed a shareholder resolution urging Caterpillar to review whether the sale of the D-9 bulldozer violates its own corporate code of conduct. The same resolution was also introduced last year by the Jewish human rights group in tandem with the Catholic Sisters of Loretto and the Mercy Investment Group. It was the first time a resolution on Israeli human rights violations had been introduced at the shareholders’ meeting. However, when the meeting took place in April this year, only four percent of the shareholders voted in favour of the resolution.

The current move is supported by the Presbyterian Church USA and could generate greater support at next year’s shareholders’ meeting. Caterpillar has come under a “huge amount of pressure” for selling bulldozers to Israel that are used to demolish homes, according to Liat Weingart, campaign director of the Jewish group. Other groups such as Amnesty International and Pax Christi have also criticised Caterpillar for its sale of bulldozers to Israel. Groups within the Mennonite and Anglican churches may also take a stand on the issue.

A month ago, Human Rights Watch issued a hard-hitting report on Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the southern Gaza strip. The report - Razing Rafah - found that claims by the Israeli Defence Force that such operations are dictated by military necessity were false and that the true intent appeared to be to expand the buffer zone between Gaza and Egypt to facilitate long-term Israeli control over the area.

Human Rights Watch says the D9 is made to military specifications and is sold to Israel under the US Foreign Military Sales Programme. Once exported to Israel, the bulldozers are armoured by the state-owned Israel Military Industries Ltd. Weighing about 64 tons, the armoured D9 stands more than 13 feet high and 26 feet long. A 23-year-old American activist, Rachel Corrie, was run over and killed last year by an armoured D9 as she was trying to block it from destroying a home in Rafah. At least three Palestinians have been killed by the bulldozer and falling debris in the last two years because they were unable to rush out of their homes in time.

The Human Rights Watch report, one of the most critical issued by the group against Israel, came after a 17-day Israeli military operation into the Jabalya refugee camp in central Gaza that left at least 110 Palestinians dead, about half of them said to be civilians. The report noted that Israeli operations in Rafah over the past four years had rendered some 16,000 people or 10 percent of its population homeless since 2000.

Caterpillar, however, has taken the view that the company does not have the practical ability or legal right to determine how its products are used after they are sold. Human Rights Watch has called it the “head-in-the-sand” approach that ignores developing international standards as defined by the United Nations.

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