Shipping Giant Maersk Divests from Companies Tied to Israel’s Illegal West Bank Settlements

By Jacob Weindling | June 24, 2025 | 12:32pm

Photo by Kees Torn

Economy Israel

Shipping Giant Maersk Divests from Companies Tied to Israel’s Illegal West Bank Settlements

While the Very Serious scolds in the mainstream media like to portray activism and protest as a navel-gazing activity that accomplishes nothing, in the real world, actual evidence proves otherwise. Maersk is the planet’s second-largest shipping company, responsible for about fifteen percent of the global container ship fleet, and it has been under pressure from activists like the Palestinian Youth Movement to divest from companies involved in Israel’s genocide and occupation of Palestine. That major news organizations in the West have ignored this big development so far is another example of how American mainstream media is just a shameless propaganda organ for Israel’s government (as of publication, there are no reports published about Maersk divesting from companies tied to the West Bank in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, or CNN).

The Palestinian Youth Movement published a report earlier this year detailing “Maersk’s role in facilitating exports from illegal Israeli settlements to the US,” and this week, Maersk wrote that “Following a recent review of transports related to the West Bank, we further strengthened our screening procedures in relation to Israeli settlements, including aligning our screening process with the OHCHR database of enterprises involved in activities in the settlements.”

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This is corporate-speak for ‘good point, we were helping Israel violate international law in the West Bank and now we won’t do that.’

Like the studies which suggest that Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 helped fuel “increases in perceptions of racial inequality [which] significantly increased the probability of vote switching toward the Democratic candidate,” activism can do something similar in the corporate world. It doesn’t even have to be altruistic, as “you are breaking the law” is a very serious threat in our litigious society fueled by perpetual profits. Lawyers don’t just leave free money sitting on the ground regardless of their beliefs, and the most straightforward way to read this is that the Palestinian Youth Movement conducted a legal risk assessment for Maersk, and the gigantic multinational corporation took their advice because they think it could be very costly to ignore it.

But this is where the altruistic aspect of activism becomes unavoidable, because as Trump and Israel and every other authoritarian in history has proven, power supersedes law. “Make me” is the most proven legal argument in human history, especially if the person leveling that case has control of the armed forces. This is the authoritarian nut that civil society has been trying to crack at least since the days when we called them Kings, and it is how Israel has brute forced its way into the Western world of elite capital while refusing to play by the rules that many other countries in their coalition at least pretend to.

Maersk is clearly divesting in part because they believe that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights still have legal standing in the parts of the world they want to do business in, which is all of it. Israel has been violating international law for its entire existence (because this iteration of it is a tool of British and American imperialism, not my people’s salvation), and Maersk has been profiting from it for many years, up until now. This is yet another marker proving that Israel has lost the war for public opinion, as a multi-billion-dollar company has concluded that Israel’s reputation has degraded enough that many courts’ response to its eternal “make me” pledge may now be “okay, bet,” and that risk isn’t worth the cost of doing business in the West Bank anymore.

It is clear as day where Israel’s genocide will lead its reputation in the less American-centric 21st century, and it is as a global pariah state. Israel is immensely dependent on the United States for support, which will only grow as the global economy shifts away from it. Maersk stopping shipments to companies operating in the West Bank is not the first successful pressure campaign by activists waged against Israel’s violations of international law, and given Israel’s pig-headed aggression that even offends Trump at this point, it very likely will not be the last.