Apartheid Chips - #BoycottIntel

Despite Israel’s livestreamed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and the nosediving international investment and confidence in its hi-tech sector (investment in 2023 down by 74%), Intel (INTC) has announced plans to build a $25 billion chipmaking factory in Israel, expanding its already large factory. Intel has also committed to buying $16.6 billion worth of goods and services from Israeli suppliers over the next decade. The new plant is due to open in 2028 and operate through 2035. 

Intel’s main facility in Israel is in Kiryat Gat, an Israeli settlement built on the ruins of the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Iraq al-Manshiyya, and lies approximately 16 miles from the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip.  

In 2020, Intel was indirectly employing some 53,000 workers in Israel, and in 2022 Intel Israel declared record exports of $8.7 billion, constituting 1.75% of Israel’s entire GDP and 5.5% of all Israeli tech exports. 

Intel’s declared goal from this investment, to “ensure that Israel remains a global center of semiconductor technology and talent,” is politically and ideologically driven. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has paid over 100 visits to Israel, and considers Intel’s business in Israel “deeply personal” to him. 

In comparison, Intel has suspended plans to invest $20 billion in new chipmaking facilities in Ohio (US), driving jobs away from the US to apartheid Israel.

On 13 December 2023, the same day the Palestinian death toll in Gaza due to Israel’s genocide passed 18,000 (about 70% of them children and women), Intel’s CEO in an interview with Fox News supported Israel’s actions saying, “I was just on the phone yesterday with Yitzhak Herzog, the President of [Israel]. This is a resilient people. We will support them, we believe so deeply in what they’ve done, but we’re also supporting the humanitarian efforts across the region.” Herzog had infamously said of Palestinians in October 2023, “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved – it’s absolutely not true.” This remark was presented by the South African legal team at the International Court of Justice as evidence of genocidal intent.

Israel’s finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a self-declared “fascist homophobe,” warmly welcomed Intel’s decision to invest $25 billion in Israel, saying, “This investment, at a time when Israel wages war against utter wickedness, a war in which good must defeat evil, is an investment in the right and righteous values that spell progress for humanity.”

Intel’s investment in Israel, a “war zone,” is ideological and obviously lacks financial merit. Intel’s planned factory would face exceptionally high security and financial and other risks.

For decades, Intel has fed Israel’s war chest like no other company. The US giant is the country’s biggest private employer, with approximately 12,800 people working for it in Israel, and it has invested more than $50 billion in the country over the last 50 years. 

Intel’s brand, which rests on the claim that it makes “technology that can enrich the lives of every person on earth” and shapes “technology as a force for good,” is tarnished by its fanatic ideological commitment to and deep complicity with an apartheid state that is perpetrating the first live-streamed genocide in history. 

The insistence by the senior management and board of directors of Intel to invest in an apartheid state that the World Court has decided is also involved in plausible genocide in Gaza incriminates the company for complicity in war crimes, crimes against humanity and possibly genocide, exposing its betrayal of its own internal policies regarding global human rights. This insistence potentially incriminates them as individual decision makers in such crimes as well, according to international law. 

TAKE ACTION NOW:

• BOYCOTT PCs and other computing devices with Intel chips

• Urge your state, city, church, trade union, university, investment fund, or pension fund to DIVEST from Intel and, where applicable, exclude Intel from contracts 

• PROTEST Intel’s genocidal investment directly to its board of directors by using this email action tool

• ORGANIZE a peaceful demonstration disrupting business as usual at an Intel location in your state (USA) or in your country (global) 

• View our full FACT SHEET with more research and context

• If you are a member of an organization that would like to be part of our evolving global #BoycottIntel campaign, fill out the linked form