Posted by John, October 31st, 2010 - under Israel, Palestine.

Tags: Better Place, Electric cars, Electric vehicles

Better Place Australia has just launched its first battery re-charge point in Canberra.

The company has big plans. It will expand these points across Canberra. Electric cars will go on sale in bulk in 2012. Then there will be re-charge points set up along the Highway between Canberra and Sydney.

‘First we take Canberra, then we take Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane’ seems to be its approach.

Better Place would not be able to do this without local Labor minority Government support. That minority Government survives through an agreement with the Greens and their votes.

BPA is working with Renault-Nissan on electric cars.

Electric cars are a good idea, aren’t they?

No, not when they are built on the bones of Palestinians.

Better Place Australia (BPA)appears to have close links with Better Place Israel (BPI). Because BPA is a private company it is difficult to get ownership information for free, but its website acknowledges BPI as an important link in the expansion plans of Better Places. As its says ‘Better Place Australia is part of a global company dedicated to zero emissions driving.’

Certainly Israel is a testing ground for Better Place globally. For example Israel is the first nation where there will be a full roll out of battery re-charge points across a country.

BPI can only do this through the illegal occupation of Palestinian land. As Ali Abunimah in the Electronic Intifada in an article called Quartet ex-envoy’s investment helps Israel greenwash settlements says:

Before BPI sells its first car in Israel it is establishing a network of thousands of charging spots on the country’s entire road system including settler roads and in settlements in the West Bank.

The company of former World Bank head James Wolfensohn has invested in BPI. To quote from the Electronic Intifada:

“Israel is a perfect test tube” for the electric car, Wolfensohn was quoted as saying in the February 2008 issue of Israel High-Tech & Investment Report. “It needs to be tested, and [BPI founder Shai] Agassi is to be commended for testing it and the Israeli government for trying it out.”

The expansion of Better Place on Palestinian land will provide lessons for the run out in Canberra. The network in Canberra will be built on the bones of Palestinians.

Without Israeli support there would be no Better Place. According to the Electronic Intifada again:

While operating as a private company — with its head office nominally in California — Better Place has been dependent on Israeli government support from the start. Initially, Agassi wrote a concept paper for the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders initiative. Agassi shopped it to various world leaders but found no takers, he told the BBC’s One Planet. “Then President [Shimon] Peres of Israel picked up on it,” Agassi recalled. “But the challenge to me was don’t ask us to do it. If you think it’s such a great business, go do it yourself. And that’s how it became a company instead of a government agency.” More recently Agassi told CNN, “I would not be doing this today were it not for [Peres]” (“Shai Agassi: One man’s mission to turn all cars electric,” CNN, 19 April 2010).

The Electronic Intifada sums up the case against BPI. It says:

The company has been a poster child for efforts to greenwash Israel — presenting it as a haven for environmental technologies — yet it has close ties to Israel’s military and political establishments and its principal officers express an explicitly anti-Muslim and anti-Arab agenda.

Better Place Australia has such apparently close links to Better Place Israel and will set up its network in Canberra based on the dispossession of the Palestinians that the local Canberra Labor Government should abandon its partnership with and support for BPA’s roll out of battery re-charge points in Canberra.

If not, then the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign should turn its attention to Better Place in Canberra.