Tomorrow (Saturday 30th December) Palestine solidarity supporters will rally in Lyttelton for a march to the port company operations centre to protest the Lyttelton Port Company hosting ZIM Shipping vessels and vessels which contract cargo space to ZIM Shipping.
We have written to the Port Company – see letter pasted at the end of this media advisory – asking the company to refuse port facilities to these vessels.
We have sent similar letters to the Ports of Auckland and Tauranga Port.
John Minto
National Chair
Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa
Letter sent to Lyttelton Port Company yesterday
Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa
28 December 2023
Barry Bragg
Chair
Lyttelton Port Company
Kia ora Mr Bragg,
Request for Lyttelton Port Company to deny port facilities to ZIM Shipping
We are asking you as Chair of the Board of the Lyttelton Port Company to deny Lyttelton Port facilities to any vessel operated by ZIM Shipping or which is contracted to provide cargo space to ZIM Shipping.
ZIM Shipping is an Israeli company which is deeply complicit in assisting the Israeli state to carry out genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza. We used the term genocide advisedly.
In addition to numerous academics, human rights organisations and legal experts, Israeli academic and associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University, Raz Segal, describes Israel’s attacks on Gaza as a “textbook case of genocide”
Zim ships are bringing in arms and ammunitions into Israel to be used in Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians civilians. Since the recent outbreak of violence the ZIM Shipping CEO Eli Glickman pledged that the company’s ships “will be directed as a first priority, to transfer cargo from anywhere in the world to Israel according to the requirements of the needs of the Ministry of Defence and the government of Israel”.
Israel is implicated in myriad war crimes in Gaza which include collective punishment of civilians, withholding food, water, fuel and electricity from the civilian population, carpet bombing of civilian areas with the inevitable huge civilian death toll. At time of writing Israel has killed more than the equivalent of all the children in 36 average-sized New Zealand primary schools. This is genocide.
We note that in your LPC Board Charter the Board’s role includes –
“ensuring the Company adheres to high standards of ethics and corporate behaviour”
We are asking you to do precisely this – to act with high standards of ethics and basic human decency and deny access to port facilities to a company heavily implicated in genocide.
We look forward to your urgent response.
Nā,
John Minto
National Chair
Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa.
