Boycotters take credit as Egged fails to win Dutch tender

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign is claiming success for the failure of Israel’s Egged bus group to clinch a bid to operate bus lines in Amsterdam and the north of the Netherlands.

Egged Bus Systems — established in 2010 to compete for tenders in the Netherlands — has provided public transport in the Waterland region, north of Amsterdam, since 2011, ferrying some 40,000 travelers on 200 buses each weekday, according to its website.

It employs around 450 people.

The most recent transportation tender ignited a BDS-sponsored email campaign against what the movement called “apartheid buses.”

According to the text of a BDS petition (in Dutch) to the Province of North Holland, Egged was one of four companies competing for a ten-year concession worth more than €19 million ($21.5 million) due to go into operation in July next year.

Noord-Holland Noord stapt niet in apartheidsbus! https://t.co/XuDezCFWiZ #bds #ebs

— BDS NL (@docP_) May 24, 2017

“Egged provides bus transportation between Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territory. According to the rules of International Law, the settlements are illegal,” the petition said. “Egged uses roads prohibited to Palestinians and operates segregated buses, forbidden to Palestinians.”

Egged denied that BDS pressure was behind the decision to not grant it the concession.

“The company was one of four competing for a tender and its proposal was examined and got to second place,” it said in a statement carried by the financial daily the Marker. “There is no connection between Egged’s not winning and claims about political pressure.”

In 2013, Egged Bus Systems reportedly ran into financial trouble, partly because it got its figures wrong in the Waterland tender. At the time, it entered talks with the Amsterdam city region on developing a cheaper timetable.

The winner of the this year’s North Holland concession was Connexxion, a company owned by the French group Veolia Transport, which pro-Palestinian advocates targeted several years ago for its role in building Jerusalem’s first light rail.

In March 2013, a French court upheld a 2007 ruling that dismissed the claim filed in a suit filed by the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Association France Palestine Solidarité against Veolia Transport, Alstom and Alstom Transport.

Quoting international treaties about the laws of occupation, the Palestinians argued that because the trains servicing the Israeli capital also crossed into East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in 1967, the French firms were complicit in Israeli violations of international law.

The French judges again threw out the case and ordered the Palestinian groups to pay a total of €90,000 (about NIS 425,000) to the French firms.

According to the Marker, Egged has asked Israel Railways to be its partner in a bid for a regional transportation network in the Rotterdam and south Holland area.