Boycotting Chevron for Fueling Genocide

Every summer in Portland, Oregon, thousands of people participate in the city’s famous World Naked Bike Ride. In the two decades since its launch, the event has become something of a tourist attraction, and one of the city’s many quirks that locals brag about.

But at an offshoot event in September 2024, Molly, one of the organizers, reminded the crowd that the naked bike ride wasn’t just a spectacle: The event was originally started in the early 2000s as a protest against fossil fuel companies. 

Molly, who asked to use her first name only for privacy, spoke about how oil and gas companies aren’t just worsening climate change and polluting the air in cities like Portland. In 2024, after nearly a year of watching Israel drop U.S.-made bombs on civilians in Gaza, she highlighted that at least one oil and gas company is also fueling the genocide in Palestine. 

“The community had been quiet about issues like Palestine,” Molly says. “But it isn’t a faraway place. It ties back to everything you care about.”  

Chevron supplies 70% of Israel’s power, including to prisons and military facilities that are crucial to Israeli occupation and illegal settlements in the West Bank. According to news reports, Chevron’s drilling platforms in the eastern Mediterranean Sea can be seen from the Gaza Strip. 

Yet the Israeli government decides if and when Palestinians can access any of that energy. That led the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement (BDS) to call for a global boycott of Chevron’s products. The movement is calling for consumers around the world to stop buying the fuel Chevron sells at gas stations, as well as its automotive coolants and engine oil. In addition, they’re calling for banks, pension funds, local governments, and other institutions to divest from the company’s stocks. 

“I think for a lot of people, it was the first time they’d heard about this, and it felt like a really important moment of connecting the dots,” Molly says. 

In the six months since that event, Molly and other organizers have continued to mobilize dozens of Portland’s bike enthusiasts to protest—fully clothed, and usually in the pouring rain—at local Chevron stations. The BDS movement’s toolkit for local organizers focuses on educational components for customers. When it comes to gas stations themselves, many gas station owners are typically locked into 25- to 30-year contracts with Chevron. So the toolkit calls for organizers to ask gas station owners to display anti-occupation flyers in their stores, or to sign letters to Chevron demanding that the company end its Israeli operations. 

The Portland protests have allowed people to realize that their individual actions can create collective pressure, said Hami, another organizer of the bike protests, who is only using their first name due to safety concerns. “When we talk about mobility freedom, there’s nothing as stark as seeing how hindered Palestinians’ mobility has been since 1948.” 

A Playbook From Apartheid

The BDS movement’s campaign against Chevron was inspired by a similar movement to pressure Royal Dutch Shell and BP to end their operations in apartheid South Africa, said Olivia Katbi, the co-chair of the U.S. BDS campaign. Shell and BP jointly owned the country’s largest oil refinery, much like Chevron currently operates Israel’s largest energy development project. 

Under apartheid in South Africa, Black communities were denied access to electricity and running water. “They were relegated to impoverished homes far from urban centers,” says Mattie Webb, Ph.D., a 20th-century historian and fellow at Yale. “Black South Africans accounted for 85 to 90% of the population on 13% of the land.” 

The country’s main power company, Eskom, maintained its own security forces as anti-apartheid activists sabotaged its power lines and stations. After South African workers went on strike following the death of a worker at the company’s coal mine—and were met with private security firing tear gas and rubber bullets—American labor unions supported boycotts of Shell. 

“When you’re looking at oil companies, and at the South African military and police, anti-apartheid activists were able to make those connections, and in my research, that is what made the case for divestment successful,” Webb says. “It was consistently showing Americans and concerned citizens globally that companies were not just profiting off of apartheid, but were allowing the regime to conduct its violent attacks on Black South Africans.” 

Today, the parallels to Palestine are stark. “Israel is pillaging these resources that belong to Palestinians—because it is Palestinian land that Israel is occupying,” Katbi says. “And then they are selling it back to them in a really unfair way.” 

After its 1967 occupation, Israel took over the existing power infrastructure in Palestine. The Israel Electric Corporation (IEC), which purchases most of its power from Chevron, has banned some Palestinian villages in the West Bank from connecting to the grid for more than 70 years. Other villages are charged different, variable rates and receive substandard service compared to nearby Jewish settlements, according to the American Friends Service Committee. 

In Palestinian villages that Israel has refused to connect to the grid, the Israeli military has even destroyed solar panels. In Gaza, where Israel has imposed a siege since 2007, the military destroyed the area’s only power plant—making the IEC its sole source of electricity. And in the ongoing war since Oct. 7, 2023, Israel completely cut off power to Gaza. 

In December, Human Rights Watch said that this amounted to “acts of genocide,” particularly as the lack of power meant that there was virtually no clean water for millions of civilians once the Strip’s desalination plants were cut off from power. Gazans rely on treated seawater or brackish groundwater, or on water pipelines that Israel can shut off on a whim. In March, UNICEF estimated that 90% of Gazans—some 1.8 million people—may not have access to clean water as Israel continues to cut power and block aid trucks from entering Gaza.

Climate organizations, like Oil Change International and some local chapters of Sunrise and 350, have supported the boycott and divestment campaigns, highlighting Chevron’s broader history of environmental catastrophes. “We’re not really inventing something new,” Katbi says. “BDS is most impactful when it’s taken as a collective action.”

And she said the campaign is winnable: There are plenty of alternative gas stations for consumers to fill their gas tanks. And perhaps more importantly, Israel’s economy has struggled over the past year, making investments in the country subject to greater risk. 

That means, in addition to the consumer boycott, the movement will continue to put pressure on institutions, governments, and other organizations to stop working with, investing in, or taking money from Chevron. 

So far, three U.S. cities have divested from Chevron and other companies profiting off of Israeli apartheid: Portland, Maine; Hayward, California; and Alameda, California. In February, the City Council of Portland, Oregon, announced it would drop the company’s sponsorship from a series of events at City Club, a nonprofit civic organization. 

“These sponsorships reach the general public in ways that Palestine activism does not—state fairs, sports teams, community events,” Katbi says. Chevron’s name is featured on exhibits at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, for example. “We are mapping those out and trying to get campaigns around this to not only impact [Chevron’s] bottom line, but make them a pariah in our community spaces.” 

Hitting the Headquarters

In Houston, Chevron is something of a household name. The company has had a presence in the city for a century and has nearly 7,000 employees there. In 2024, the company moved its headquarters to Houston. 

Last year, the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter started a campaign to get the Houston Marathon’s board to drop Chevron as its main sponsor—a title the company has held for 13 years. 

“The majority of the money the marathon makes is from the runners—the people who are making it happen,” said AJ Holmes, an organizer with the Houston DSA. “It’s really hypocritical to plaster Chevron’s image on this event. Personally, my family has run in the marathon before, and I grew up thinking this was totally normal. It’s like it’s in the air that we breathe, literally.” 

The campaign has had conversations with local running clubs and the marathon’s staffers, educating people about the connections between Chevron and Israeli apartheid. They’re making clear what it means to be in the “belly of the beast of imperialism,” Holmes said, thinking more broadly about Houston’s role in the fossil fuel industry. 

Despite collaborating with groups like the Sunrise Movement and the Palestine Youth Movement, the campaign was ultimately unsuccessful: The Houston Marathon renewed Chevron’s sponsorship contract for five more years. 

Still, the work will continue: Activists will keep pressuring the Houston Marathon to cancel the new contract, Holmes said, and they will focus on Chevron’s other activities, like its sponsorship of the local Pride Parade. Organizers are gearing up for major demonstrations and teach-ins ahead of CERAWeek, a major energy conference that convenes the CEOs of the world’s largest oil and gas companies in Houston annually.

“They spend a lot of money on these events, trying to make themselves seem more progressive or palatable,” Holmes says. “Our goal is to make sure that doesn’t work, and that all their propaganda money isn’t useful.”