SolarEdge: Israel’s dirty green energy company

Recently, the spotlight has been on arms manufacturers that profit from Israel’s genocidal practices. But powering colonisation and oppression isn’t done just by weapons companies. Brands that present themselves as green and ethical are sometimes guilty too.

One example is SolarEdge, an Israeli company founded in 2006 by former special forces soldier Guy Sella and partly owned by BlackRock, one of the world’s most prominent investors in climate destruction.

Sella’s motto for SolarEdge was “Legal, moral and profitable”. But the company is based in Herzliya, northern Tel Aviv, one of the first Zionist settlements in Palestine. In 2018, the company built production facilities in the colonised Upper Galilee, and also has offices in Modi’in-Maccabim-Re’ut, an Israeli settlement in West Bank Palestine considered illegal by the United Nations.

In his youth, Sella volunteered with the Israeli military’s Sayeret Matkal unit, becoming a team commander. The Sayeret Matkal is nominally considered an “anti-terrorist” unit, though that designation in the context of Israel’s longstanding occupation is questionable. The unit’s involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon also suggests that it may itself have been involved in terrorising civilians.

Sella went on to command the military’s Intelligence Corps, ending his career as a lieutenant colonel. Before founding SolarEdge, he was also responsible for establishing Star Ventures with several of his former soldiers. Sella died in 2019, but these co-founders maintain involvement in the company.

One is Lior Handlesman, who was, until recently, the company’s vice-president of marketing and product strategy. Handlesman is also involved in another company, Grove Ventures, which specialises in “defence start-ups”.

SolarEdge CEO Zvi Lando recently resigned but, under his leadership, the company became Israel’s most valuable, with an estimated US$20 billion market value. Before joining SolarEdge, Lando was a director at Camp Magen (Camp Defence in Hebrew), which was founded to instil Zionist propaganda in both Israeli and American youth and train them in combat techniques.

Israel already has compulsory service, drafting youth into a military that is primarily deployed to keep the non-Jewish population of Israel in line and to intimidate Palestinian civilians. In this context, Camp Magen should be viewed as an extension of Israeli militarisation.

Not only does SolarEdge have offices based in occupied Palestinian territory, but in 2015, the company supplied parts to solar farms in the illegal Israeli settlements Shdemot Mehola and Petza’el in the Jordan Valley, occupied West Bank. Settlements are illegal expansions of Israeli territory into Palestinian land, usually accompanied by Israeli settler violence against Palestinians and mostly backed by the Israeli state.

SolarEdge also directly supplies the Israel Prison Service, which currently detains 9,500 Palestinian prisoners, of whom at least 3,500 are held without charge. This includes 200 children. A dual legal system exists in Palestine, under which Israeli settlers are held accountable to Israeli civil law while Palestinians are bound by Israeli military law and tried in military courts run by Israeli soldiers and officers. Such is the nature of the Israeli apartheid regime.

Adding to SolarEdge’s questionable history, the company’s major shareholder is BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company, which also holds a dubious record.

BlackRock’s significant investments in the arms industry include Elbit Systems, which supplies both the Israeli military and Myanmar’s junta. According to Weapons Free Funds, a website that tracks ethical investments, BlackRock has $78.01 billion in military investments. This year, the United Nations warned BlackRock to stop supplying weapons to Israel.

Furthermore, the company has been consistently criticised for crimes against the environment and indigenous communities. The investment fund has one of the world’s most extensive fossil fuel portfolios. US media network CBS valued the portfolio at $US260 billion in 2022, including a 6 percent share in Exxon.

SolarEdge cannot maintain any claim to sustainability when its major shareholder holds some of the world’s most environmentally destructive investments. And it cannot claim to be “moral” when its business operations are carried out on occupied land and its products are supplied to Israeli settlements.

There is good news, however.

Over the last two years, SolarEdge has been in crisis, its market value crashing to US$1.6 billion. Calcialist Tech, a news website, claims this is due to rising US interest rates reducing investment, the global fall in demand for solar power products and an oversupply of materials in Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

But many Israeli companies are facing a crisis. More than 46,000 businesses closed in six months, and the country’s GDP fell by 20 percent.

The economic deterioration is related to the war. But the Boycott, Divest and Sanction campaign, which encourages people and companies to disinvest from Israeli products, has also had an effect. Over the years, BDS has forced companies such as Ben & Jerries and Puma to withdraw major contracts with Israel.

It should be no surprise that BDS lists SolarEdge as a company that should be boycotted.

An opportunity to raise awareness about SoarEdge is at the Clean Energy Council’s All Energy Australia Exhibition & Conference being held at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre on 23-24 October. Billed as the country’s “largest and most anticipated clean energy event”, the two-day meeting showcases new developments in renewable energy technology, hosts workshops and boasts more than 400 stalls from a broad range of international companies and agencies.

Just last month, the exhibition centre hosted Land Forces, a military technology conference that showcases the latest in killing machines. The arms conference was met by protests that resulted in serious police violence. The All Energy conference might claim to be “serious about sustainability”, but don’t be fooled into thinking green capitalism is any more ethical.

SolarEdge is based in and supplies illegal settlements and a prison service that detains thousands of innocent Palestinians, including children. If the company’s morals reflect its founders, then they are those of men who violently pursued the colonisation and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Out of Sella’s “Legal, moral and profitable”, we’re left with only “profitable”—but even that has come under pressure.

Isolating the Israeli economy is one of the most powerful ways that we can help the Palestinian liberation struggle. This means helping to build the BDS movement and exposing companies like SolarEdge.

Unions should place bans on SolarEdge products, and its presence at conferences like All Energy should be protested.

Tommy Lawson is an electrician in the renewables sector and author of “Foundational Concepts of the Specific Anarchist Organisation”.