According to this report on the Electronic Intifada website, the 350,000 member Dutch trade union Abvakabo has cancelled a contract with the security company G4S due to its connections with Israel.  According to the report, G4S stands accused of having “equipped Israel’s prisons in the occupied West Bank“.

G4S is actually accused of something rather different by pro-BDS campaigners.

According to the website of the pro-Hamas Palestine Solidarity Campaign, G4S “services Israeli prisons to which Palestinian prisoners are illegally transferred in serious violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention”. In other words, it is not so much G4S’s involvement with prisons in the West Bank that is the problem, but prisons inside Israel.

PSC makes this abundantly clear when it writes “G4S has announced the ending of its contract to one Israeli prison in the occupied West Bank – Ofer – but not its contracts for servicing other prisons or detention facilities in the West Bank and Israel, including Ketziot and Megiddo prisons … Holding Palestinians from the West Bank in detention facilities inside Israel, is in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits the transfer of these prisoners from the territory that is being occupied.”

The pro-BDS campaigners don’t want companies doing business with Israeli institutions in the occupied West Bank and they don’t want to do business with Israel proper.