Corporate Watch has continued to track corporate complicity in Israeli apartheid this month. Along with the two articles included in this news update we have tracked construction and agricultural companies operating in the Dead Sea settlement of Kibbutz Kalia. We've also taken a look at Readymix Industries, a company operating out of Israel's settlements and supplying construction materials for settlements and the apartheid wall. It is owned by the multinational company, Cemex, which operates in the UK. Visit our blog Corporate Occupation to read more.

Kibbutz Kalia Part 1 – A holiday in Israeli apartheid

Kibbutz Kalia is an illegal Israeli settlement on the north coast of the Dead Sea. It offers bed and breakfast and a private beach, and is attempting to tap into the steady flow of tourists to the area.

Visitors to the area could be forgiven for not realising that Kibbutz Kalia lies in occupied territory. It's a straight drive along Route 90 which almost entirely bypasses Palestinian communities. The north coast of the Dead Sea, although only a few kilometres from Jericho, is completely devoid of Palestinian areas and only when you go inside Carmel Agrexco date packing houses will you see Palestinians. Those workers that are visible on Kibbutz Kalia’s settlement farms are in the main migrants from Thailand.

Kalia advertises rooms at its guesthouse on a number of websites including www.booking.com, www.venere.com, www.agoda.com, www.travelbyclick.net and www.webtourist.net. None of these websites make clear that Kalia is in occupied Palestine nor that it is an illegal Israeli settlement.

The kibbutz itself is a fenced and gated unit guarded by an IDF soldier. The guesthouse is run by the kibbutz from the main office, which also sells tickets for Kalia’s private beach. Kibbutz Kalia has approximately 300 residents. Inside the kibbutz there is a dairy farm, but the main source of income, other than tourism, seems to be the fields of date palms stretching toward the border with Jordan.

Kalia beach, where tourists can swim in the Dead Sea for around £20, boasts a shop selling Dead Sea mud and mineral products packaged by Sea of Spa, Premier and Ahava. Kibbutz Kalia also runs the other major tourist attraction in the area, Qumran, which is the site of the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. However, the site is now a stopping point for tourist buses where people are taken into a series of gift shops selling Ahava, Premier, Revival and Sea of Spa Dead Sea products.

International Zionist organisations supporting Maskiot’s plans for ethnic cleansing

Big corporations are not alone in implementing the Israeli occupation on the ground. In the smaller settlements which do not yet have any industry or commercial outlets, ideological charities and religious groups, in particular, play a crucial role when it comes to encouraging settlement expansion. This is the case with Maskiot, the first new settlement to be approved in the West Bank for a decade when it was officially established in the middle of 2008.

Located in the Jordan Valley, an area under serious threat of Israeli annexation, (see here) Maskiot is strongly Zionist and inhabited by ex-Gaza settlers determined to continue to expropriate Palestinian land and ‘repopulate’ the valley with Jewish settlers; in other words, to ethnically cleanse the area of Palestinians. Last week on Sunday 28th April, as a clear provocation, armed settlers from Maskiot entered the Bedouin area of Al Maleh and set up a tent only 10 metres from the community, preventing people from accessing parts of their land. This act follows numerous acts of aggression against the people of Al Maleh during the last few years. The settlers are helped in these pursuits by their supporters. In the case of Maskiot, this means the One Israel Fund and Christian Friends of Israeli Communities, which have both contributed to Maskiot’s development.

The One Israel Fund is a Zionist organisation with charity status in the US which has as its stated aims the support of settler families and the promotion of further settlement expansion both in the West Bank and Gaza. Founded in 1994 by Yechiel Leiter, the fund works closely with Israeli settler communities, government and the IDF. New settlements, such as Maskiot, receive a great deal of support from the organisation, which states that it is “dedicated to helping these former residents of Gush Katif [a now evicted settlement in Gaza] become the self-sufficient pioneers of Israel they once were and strive to become again.” The Maskiot Development Fund has its own project tab on the fund's website, indicating that it continues to support the attempted expansion of the Zionist settlement and thereby also advocates the removal of Palestinians from the area.

Christian Friends of Israeli Communities is a Zionist Christian group established in 1995 as a response to the Oslo Accords. It supports a total Israeli takeover of the West Bank and Gaza on supposedly religious grounds, and runs an ‘adopt a settlement’ programme for its members. It has funded Maskiot’s olive grove, which is planted illegally on Palestinian land. CFOIC has offices in Israel, the US, Germany, Holland and the UK.

A report from inside Maskiot can be found at www.brightonpalestine.org/node/611.