Three companies headquartered in Aberdeen are supporting and profiting from energy apartheid and a genocide that the Scottish Government claims to oppose, writes Dave Black.
ln September, Keir Starmer recognised a Palestinian state, supposedly in response to Israel’s genocide and enforced starvation of Gaza. This recognition, orchestrated with several Western leaders, is a distraction from what is needed: wide scale divestment and sanctions, and the immediate end of all arms sales to Israel. Such recognition has however highlighted Israel’s longer term settler colonial project, which includes seeking complete control over all meaningful energy sources and infrastructure in order to make a Palestinian state economically unviable. This project is today being propped up and funded by oil and gas companies based in Scotland.
Destruction of Palestinian energy infrastructure
Those who watched the genocide in Gaza unfold in late 2023 will remember that one of Israel’s tactics from the outset was to cut off energy to the enclave, resulting in fuel rapidly running out, the closure of water desalination plants, as well as huge impacts on key infrastructure like hospitals. While most pointed out the genocidal intent of such an act, Keir Starmer infamously defended it.
This was not the first time Israel used these tactics. As Zachary Cuyler wrote in 2024:
Israel’s capacity to almost instantaneously cut power to the 2.2 million people living in the Gaza Strip is not unprecedented. It is the result of a century of policy and the construction of a centralized, fossil-fuelled, Israeli-controlled energy system. Palestinian energy dependence is integral to Israel’s domination of Palestinian life. It constitutes a key tool for the practices of exploitation, expropriation, siege, colonization and removal to which Palestinians have long been subjected.1
The success of Israel’s settler colonial project has been driven in significant part by its capture and control of key resources and strategic assets, such as borders, airspace, water supplies, and energy sources. Britain’s colonial overseers were well aware that the land and resources being taken over by Jewish settlers pre-1948 would allow, in the words of Lalel Khalil, for “uneven development and asymmetric utilisation of an infrastructure that extended from the river to the sea”. The occupation of Palestinian Territories by Israel in 1967 increased the Palestinians’ unwilling reliance on Israeli energy infrastructure, therefore allowing power to be turned off by the occupier at the flick of a switch.
The expressed intention of the 1993 Oslo Accords was to facilitate greater cooperation between Israel and Palestine on the securing and provision of key resources, eventually leading to a viable Palestinian state. They have instead only led to greater Israeli control and domination over Palestinian life.2 Since the Accords, there has been a huge increase in Israeli colonies or settlements in the West Bank, as well as the building of a giant separation wall. Both are illegal under international law, both have been a tool to secure further strategic assets for Israel, and both further deprive Palestinians of the resources that would make an independent state viable.
Energy Apartheid
In recent years, Israel’s systematic oppression of Palestinians has increasingly been recognised as apartheid, including by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the leading Palestinian and Israeli human rights organisations. A 2022 publication by Amnesty International stated:
Israel has created and maintains an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination over Palestinians, which is enforced across Israel and the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories] through reinforcing discriminatory laws, policies and practices, and, when seen as a totality, controls virtually every aspect of Palestinians’ lives and routinely violates their human rights.3
Energy apartheid then, is a concise way to capture the combined discriminatory policies and practices that have led to where we are today. Deeply fragmented areas of land are cut off from key natural assets and resources, while Palestinians have no ultimate control over production of access to energy resources in their land and waters. The most extreme expression of energy apartheid is the genocidal starvation of energy resources to Gaza over the past two years.
Complicity in Scotland
It is now fifteen years since Wood Group (now “Wood PLC”) was awarded a contract by Dorad Energy worth over £560 million to build the Dorad Power Station in Israel. At the time it was Israel’s largest private power station and the first to sell off energy directly to private buyers. These buyers included the Israeli Ministry of Defence, Mekerot (the Israeli water company), and multiple businesses based or working in illegal Israeli settlements. The Dorad plant was built in Ashkelon, now a large Israeli port city. Before 1948 Ashkelon was Al-Majdal,4 one of more than 400 villages destroyed or forcibly depopulated during the Nakba (the Catastrophe).
While the Dorad station was in construction, Wood Group proudly called it a “cornerstone of extensive operations in Israel”.5 However, following a robust campaign led by Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC), which included the targeting of company AGMs, press coverage, and engagement with staff, there has been very little further work undertaken by Wood Group within or on behalf of Israel.
Oil and gas operator Ithaca Energy has recently risen to prominence for its role in the Rosebank and Cambo oil fields, west of Shetland. The company is a subsidiary of the Israeli-owned Delek Group, one of the companies blacklisted by the United Nations for operating in illegal Israeli settlements.6 Via its subsidiary Delek Israel, Delek also has a contract with the Israeli Ministry of Defence to fuel military vehicles. Another Delek subsidiary, Delek Drilling, is involved in extraction from the Eastern Mediterranean Leviathan oil field, off the coast of Gaza. Ithaca has come under increasing scrutiny from the Stop Rosebank campaign, through the targeting of its AGMs as well as days of action focusing on companies linked to Rosebank.
In late October 2023, just weeks into Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, Dana Petroleum and five other companies were awarded a contract by Israel for gas exploration adjacent to the Leviathan field. The contract awarded to Dana, along with Italian energy giant Eni, and Ratio Petroleum, was particularly egregious, as around 62% of the area under their exploration is internationally recognised as part of Palestinian waters. The contract, and particularly the role of Dana Petroleum and Eni, was the focus of a recent toolkit published by the Palestinian Boycott National Committee and others, entitled ‘Disrupting Energy Corporations for the Liberation of Palestine’.7 This initiative has inspired the launch of a global campaign led by SPSC and BDS Korea among others.8
Apartheid Oil on Our Hands
Israel’s energy apartheid regime, overtly and covertly developed and sustained over decades, is one of the substantive reasons why a Palestinian state is not viable, and why recognition of a Palestinian state with no consideration of access to and control of key resources is disingenuous and undermines the path to liberation. To recognise a state in theory while at the same time being complicit in denying that state the resources needed for autonomy is the height of lip service. Rhetoric and statements need to be backed up with material change.
The three companies noted above, Dana Petroleum, Wood Group and Ithaca Energy, are headquartered in Aberdeen, the ‘oil capital’ of Europe. Little over ten years ago, in the throes of a vigorous conversation about the viability of an independent Scotland, an important part of the debate centred on the strength of the North Sea oil industry. As conversations continue around the future of Scotland, we must not forget or ignore the role of that industry in supporting and profiting from energy apartheid and a genocide which the Scottish Government claims to oppose. We must act now, pressuring the Scottish Government to take solid action to end its complicity, and taking our BDS campaigns to the next level, to boycott and isolate Israel for the liberation of Palestine.
Dave Black is on the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign (SPSC) National Executive Committee.
- https://merip.org/2025/01/power-struggles-energy-as-a-weapon-of-war-domination-and-resistance-in-palestine/ ↩︎
- https://jacobin.com/2013/04/the-oslo-illusion/ ↩︎
- https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/ ↩︎
- https://www.britannica.com/place/Ashkelon;https://www.palestineremembered.com/Gaza/al-Majdal-Asqalan/index.html;https://www.palestinechronicle.com/ashkelon-the-story-of-the-middle-east-conflict/ ↩︎
- https://en.globes.co.il/en/article-1000640176 ↩︎
- https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session60/advance-version/a-hrc-60-19-aev.pdf ↩︎
- https://www.bdsmovement.net/sites/default/files/2025-06/Dana-Eni-toolkit.pdf ↩︎
- https://www.scottishpsc.org.uk/campaigns/energy-apartheid-campaign/dana-petroleum-dont-fuel-israeli-genocide/ ↩︎