Denmark Bank Dumps Israel’s Bank Hapoalim Over Occupation Backing
A Danish bank has added Israel’s Bank Hapoalim to its list of companies it won’t invest in, over its dealings in the West Bank.
Israel’s Bank Hapoalim was added to the Danske Bank’s list of excluded companies on January 14, according to the bank’s website, which cited the Israeli bank’s involvement in “construction activities in conflict with international humanitarian law.”
The same reasoning — a reference to Israeli construction in the West Bank — was used by the bank in 2010, when it Africa Israel and Danya Cebus. That year the bank also divested from the defense contractor Elbit, citing its alleged involvement in “supplying electronic equipment in conflict with human rights norms.”
The bank, Denmark’s largest according to its own publications, has a list of 33 excluded firms, four of which are Israeli.
Israel’s ambassador to Denmark, Arthur Avnon, accused the bank of focusing disproportionately on Israel.
“What they are really doing is playing with politics, and not, as they say, worrying about moral values or violations of international norms,” he was quoted as telling the news site Business.dk.
Several northern European financial institutions have divested from Israeli banks and firms over the past year over what they perceive as illegal activity in the West Bank, including the PGGM pensions administrator in the Netherlands and Norway’s GPFG pension fund.
On Friday, U.S. State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf reacted to these developments in a statement saying that “Boycotts directed against Israel are unhelpful, and we oppose them.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO