The Global Boycott HP campaign is observing its Week of Action. Groups all over the world are organizing actions, sharing their victories and strengthening the campaign in creative ways. All these efforts are directed towards demanding accountability from Hewlett Packard companies, HP Inc and HP-Enterprises, for their complicity with Israel’s occupation, apartheid and settler-colonialism against Palestinian people.
Hewlett Packard (HP) split into HP Inc and HP-E in 2015. Both in their previous and current avatars, HP companies have provided crucial support to Israel’s regime. Currently, HP-E provides Israel’s Population and Immigration Authority with the exclusive Itanium servers for its population registry. This system is the basis of apartheid and racial segregation against non-Jewish citizens of Israel and the ‘residents’ of East Jerusalem whose fundamental rights could be and are snatched away arbitrarily. HP-E also maintains the ‘Yesha’ database for illegal Israeli settlers living in the occupied West bank, therefore facilitating Israel’s settler-colonialism. HP-E’s spin-off DXC Technology also maintains a facility in an illegal Israeli settlement. HP Inc provides computers to Israeli army which occupies, massacres and represses Palestinians.
In the past, HP provided computers to Israeli Navy which maintains the inhuman blockade over Gaza. It also provided services to Israel’s Prison Services and was the technology behind the biometric access on Israeli checkpoints, the Basel System.
The most effective way to pressurize HP companies to end these contracts with Israel is through pressure of boycotts and divestments. In the past, several major transnational corporations have withdrawn from Israel due to peaceful public pressure. Presently, HP companies are one of the biggest campaigns of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The Palestinian BDS National Committee, which leads the movement, has held that until HP companies provide unequivocal evidence of ending their business relations with Israeli entities that violate Palestinian human rights, “human rights advocates and campaigners, including in the BDS movement, can and should hold both HP-E and HP Inc. accountable for human rights abuses committed in the name of the shared brand through boycott and divestment actions”.
In the light of this, and to strengthen the Boycott HP campaign which was also launched in India last year, the following organizations have declared their spaces ‘HP Free Zones’. This implies that these spaces will not buy new HP products, and the existing HP products in their premises will be the last ones until the companies end their profiteering from the violations of international law and Palestinian human rights.
Indian Writers Forum
Newsclick.in
Alternative Law Forum
National Dalit Christian Watch
May Day Bookstore
LeftWord Books
Studio Safdar
Focus on the Global South
Indian Campaign for Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel
Palestine Solidarity Committee in India
People’s Dispatch
