Call to close Barclays accounts
The British-based multinational bank Barclays is bankrolling Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza. Anyone with an account is asked to close it.
Barclays holds vast shareholdings – worth more than £2 billion – in big arms and tech companies that supply the hardware. It also advances and underwrites loans to them currently worth £6.1 billion.
The biggest investments are in BAE Systems, Boeing, and Caterpillar – the US firm that manufactures the sinister armoured bulldozers used by Israel to demolish Palestinian homes.
The bank has a role as “primary dealer” in dealing in Israel government bonds, getting paid to boost fund-raising by the apartheid state. But it has not exercised this role for nearly three years, which Palestine supporters say is due to their campaign.
Boycotts explained
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a worldwide, Palestinian-led movement upholding the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.
Inspired by the South African anti-apartheid movement, BDS calls for action to pressure Israel to comply with international law. It has three basic goals:
Freedom – Justice – Equality
- End Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land
- Support the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes
- End discrimination against Palestinian citizens of Israel
Boycott – Divest – Sanction
- Ending support for Israel’s apartheid regime by breaking links with corporations and organisations that uphold it. This means not buying Israeli goods, no business with Israeli or international companies involved in violating Palestinian rights and no cooperation with Israeli sporting, cultural, and academic institutions.
- Campaigning for banks, local councils, churches, pension funds, and universities to withdraw investments from Israel and all Israeli and international companies that sustain Israeli apartheid.
- Pressuring governments to stop supporting the Israeli apartheid regime. This means banning business with illegal Israeli settlements, ending military trade and free-trade agreements, as well as suspending Israel’s membership to international forums such as UN bodies and FIFA.
The joint initiative by Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC), War on Want and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade calls on supporters to close their accounts on the same day – October 29, 2026. Barclays owns Tesco Bank so Tesco account holders are urged to do the same.
The campaign says that more than 6,000 people have closed their Barclays accounts on earlier mass closure days. Information on how to go about it is on the PSC website.
In the second half of the 20th century Barclays was a principal target in the triumphant public campaigns against South Africa. Then too the bank was the biggest financial backer of a violently racist apartheid state that collapsed under international pressure in 1992.
The term apartheid, now applied by many legal experts to Israel, originated in the strict racial divisions between black and white people in South Africa – comparable to the enforced divisions between Jews and Palestinians in Israel. Apartheid – apartness – being the Afrikaans word for separation.
The unions back BDS
The Trade Union Congress (TUC) voted in September to back BDS, calling it “an effective strategy to pressure Israel to end its ongoing genocide, system of apartheid, occupation and denial of the right of return for refugees”.
At their annual gathering in Brighton, unions representing more than 5 million British workers called on the government to end military cooperation, to impose wide-ranging sanctions on Israel until it complies with international law, and to commit to freedom of speech on Palestine.
The vote came days after the UK government announced some sanctions on Israeli settlements but declared total opposition to BDS targeting Israel as a whole.
A spokesperson for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign said the TUC vote showed “the limited steps announced by the government fall far short of meeting Britain’s legal obligations not to assist Israel’s ongoing genocide, apartheid, illegal occupation and other violations of international law.”
