Yet More Success Against BDS

SodaStream, an Israeli company, hit the world headlines  when the boycott (BDS) campaigners attacked the company's products claimed they were produced in "Palestinian occupied lands".

The company at the time was employing over 1000 workers of whom 65% were Palestinian.

Fast forward a few years after the company moved its activities to a new factory near Beer Sheva and bingo:-

- Significant growth in new exiting markets
- A share price increase of 300% in the last 18 months
- A workforce offering employment to the Bedouin community

Some of the original Palestinian workforce  have received work permits to allow  them to work in the new facility and although the present numbers , 80 is likely to double shortly, it is a far cry from the numbers previously employed.

The bottom line is that the BDS campaign resulted in more suffering of the Palestinian community while SodaStream just goes on growing,

Israelis and Palestinians as Co-Workers

Two stories indicate that if the is willingness by leaders on BOTH sides to live together, there is reason for hope. Two stories this week are worth reporting.

 

a-   Sodastream’s Palestinian Employees To Receive Renewed Work Permits

Sharon Udasin  May 22, 2017

Workers brush aside long commute to work for CEO Birnbaum, a ‘man of peace.’

 A group of 74 Palestinian employees will be returning to work at SodaStream, after the government rescinded their work permits more than a year ago.

“SodaStream is our second home,” Ali Jafar, 42, told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.

“When you have the opportunity to return home, you return.”

After years of loyal work at the company – and hours of daily travel – Jafar and his Jerusalem-area Palestinians colleagues received notice in February 2016 that the government would no longer be renewing their entry permits. Last week, however, they learned that their permits were finally being renewed – and that they would likely be able to return to the company’s Negev Desert factory within just a few weeks.

 
“If you like someone, you have to go to him wherever he lives,” said Jafar, who worked for SodaStream for three years.

The Palestinian employees had originally worked at the company’s former headquarters in the West Bank industrial zone of Mishor Adumim, near Ma’aleh Adumim.

In 2015, SodaStream moved from Mishor Adumim to an expansive campus at the Idan Negev industrial area, a joint work zone for the Beduin town of Rahat, the Jewish community of Lehavim and the Bnei Shalom Regional Council.

While 500 Palestinian employees lost their jobs after the Mishor Adumim plant closed, 74 of them, including Jafar, were able to continue working at the firm’s new plant in the Negev until the government eventually revoked their permits.

“We are delighted to welcome back our 74 devoted Palestinian employees, who are able to join their 1,500 friends at our Rahat facility in the Negev,” Daniel Birnbaum, global CEO of SodaStream, said on Sunday.

“The Israeli government did the moral and honorable thing to grant work permits to our employees, who can now provide for their families and also prove that coexistence is possible.”

 

b.- Co-Workers

Oded Revivi May 21, 2017

President Trump has described the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians in terms of a business negotiation. Days after taking office he told The Wall Street Journal that Middle East peace would be “the ultimate deal.”

Mr. Trump might be onto something. Conventional wisdom for almost a century has dictated that for peace to prevail, Israelis and Palestinians must be physically separated. But separation is one of the main reasons the conflict drags on interminably. Peace is fostered over generations, through personal bonds and even business relationships.

Most Israelis and Palestinians don’t interact with someone from the other side on a daily basis. The exceptions are the 450,000 Israelis and more than one million Palestinians who live side by side in Judea and Samaria, or what many call the West Bank. The tens of thousands who work together every day in the area’s 14 industrial zones have built the closest bonds.

During his visit to Israel this week, Mr. Trump should drop in on a business like Lipski Plastics in the Barkan Industrial Park, some 15 miles east of Tel Aviv. Half the company’s workers are Palestinian and half are Israeli. They eat, laugh and solve problems together. The Palestinians at Lipski make four times the average wage in the autonomous Palestinian areas. Many are in senior management, with dozens of Israeli employees beneath them. Muslim, Christian or Jew, these people return home each day with a sense of accomplishment knowing that they can provide for their families with dignity and pride.

Islands of peace like Barkan show what could be achieved on a massive scale by a leader with true vision. Sadly, for decades these examples have been largely ignored or boycotted because of the flawed notion that any Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria is an impediment to peace.

The new White House has already brought a fresh perspective to the Middle East. Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Jason Greenblatt, broke with decades of failed State Department policy by meeting in March with a delegation of Israeli residents of Judea and Samaria. He also met with young Palestinians and Israelis from across the political, religious and socioeconomic spectrum. These meetings demonstrated a genuine attempt to understand the reality on the ground, something that has been lacking in international diplomatic efforts for decades. This is how peace will be built.

Why BDS Still Targets SodaStream

Zahava Raymond 2nd Mar 2016 for Honest Reporting

When SodaStream moved out of the West Bank in October 2015 under pressure from BDS, 500 Palestinian employees lost their jobs. Another 74 were able to continue working at the new factory close to the southern town of Rahat, but only on temporary work permits. On Monday, those permits expired and SodaStream was forced to let its last Palestinian employees go.

Thanks to the BDS movement’s actions, close to 600 Palestinians have now lost their jobs.

BDS activists have clearly demonstrated beyond all doubt that their only goal is to harm Israel, and they don’t care one iota if that causes Palestinians to suffer. Mahmoud Nawajaa, the BDS coordinator in Ramallah, called the loss of the Palestinian jobs at SodaStream

“ part of the price that should be paid in the process of ending the occupation.”

BDS caused  irrevocable damage by costing 600 Palestinians their livelihoods, but the movement got what it wanted. BDS supporters claim they are against “the occupation,” and SodaStream has moved out of the West Bank. What more could there possibly be left for them to do now?

Join the Fighting BDS Facebook page and follow @FightingBDS on Twitter and stand up against the delegitimization of Israel.

The boycott movement will still be targeting SodaStream as leaders claim that operating from the Negev “amounts to participation in Israel’s plans to forcibly displace at least 40,000 Palestinian Bedouins into townships,” and according to BDS leader Omar Barghouti, “colluding in the ethnic cleansing of Bedouin Palestinian citizens.” Except the Bedouins are not Palestinians, and BDS is simply hijacking their identity to fit their narrative portraying Israel as an occupier of Palestinian land.

This is in reference to the contentious Prawer-Begin plan which was dropped while the government sought to formulate a new version, but aimed to resolve the issues of illegal Bedouin settlements and to more fully integrate them into Israeli society.

The SodaStream factory was built in a new industrial zone in the Negev administered by the Bedouin city of Rahat, the Jewish town of Lahavim and the Bnei Shimon Regional Council. Around 40 factories will be based in this industrial zone when it is fully developed, providing employment for hundreds of workers, including many Bedouins from nearby towns. A college and hospital are also being built. The Negev is uncontested land under Israeli sovereignty, but to BDS it is another area that can be used in the attempt to delegitimize Israel altogether.

Just like the 600 Palestinians who lost their jobs, the plight of the Bedouins and the reality of the situation are irrelevant to BDS. The movement will take any opportunity to demonize Israel, even if it is to the detriment of the people it claims to care about.

BDS Is About Israel, Not Settlements

Tom Wilson (a British born writer and political analyst)

The campaign to boycott Israel–the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement–is undoubtedly a fringe campaign. But where this small band of anti-Israel extremists have experienced some traction is among those whom they have been able to convince that BDS is only against settlements. The argument goes that a boycott of Israeli settler produce will somehow persuade the Israelis to abandon their security concerns and bring an end to their so-called occupation of the West Bank. Yet one only has to look to how BDS conducts its campaigns in practice to see that this alleged concern with the “occupation” is just one of many disingenuous claims from what is, at its heart, an entirely disingenuous movement.

Listening to the words of BDS leaders such as Omar Barghouti you soon realize that the end goal of BDS is nothing less than the total elimination of the Jewish state.

But unlike Barghouti, most of the BDS movement has the common sense not to state this so publicly. As such, BDS efforts have been ostensibly focused around boycotting settlements; although in practice this still allows campaigners to attack most Israeli companies by making flimsy arguments about guilt by association. So for instance the Israeli national theater company Habima was targeted on the grounds that it had previously performed in settlements. In Europe this argument is beginning to take hold. Supermarket chains, churches, city councils, and now EU diplomats are all coming round to the idea that boycotting the Jewish state outright may be going too far, but boycotting Jews who dare to live on the “wrong side” of a defunct armistice line is perfectly acceptable.

For BDS, SodaStream was the ideal target. This high-profile company, with its popular products and Super Bowl commercials featuring Scarlett Johansson, had one of its factories just to the east of Jerusalem in the West Bank. The fact that SodaStream boasted of being the largest commercial employer of Palestinians in the world did nothing to dissuade BDS from its efforts. Indeed, just a few months back when it was announced that SodaStream would relocate its factory from the West Bank to the Israeli Negev, BDS expressed no remorse for the Palestinian workers losing their jobs, but only exuberance at their own apparent victory.

Still, now that SodaStream is relocating from the West Bank BDS will be dropping the boycott, right? Wrong! As if proof was needed that fleeing the settlements will do nothing to appease those who simply hate the Jewish state in its entirety, BDSniks have said that they will continue to boycott SodaStream. Now the pretext for boycotting is the allegation that the new factory will be based “close to” a town being built to provide local Bedouin with housing. And supposedly this renders SodaStream “implicated in the displacement of Palestinians.” One can scarcely believe that the movement’s leaders believe such claims, but then these are the feeble excuses of bigots trying to hide and justify their unacceptable agenda.

The true character of BDS is becoming increasingly apparent as the boycotters shift their attention toward targets that even they can’t bracket in with settlements and “stolen land,” except of course for the fact that BDS clearly considers all of Israel stolen land and any Jewish enterprise on that land to be a pollution. Israeli-Arabs are of course exempt from boycotts. Because at its core BDS is a movement that makes ethnicity the dividing line that determines who is to be boycotted and who isn’t. As such, it comes as no surprise that BDS activists in the UK have launched action against Sabon, an Israeli cosmetics company that has always been based within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

Sabon opened its first luxury cosmetics store in London at the beginning of November and BDSers were demonstrating outside within just four days of its arrival. Over the weekend activists staged a particularly aggressive gathering, in which one of the ringleaders was heard employing the most shameless blood libel language, barking coldly down the megaphone: “you don’t want to be going into this shop, buying beautiful smelling lotions to smear over your body, because if you do you will be smearing yourself in the blood of Palestinians.” And yet this particular Saturday morning protest appears to have been spearheaded by the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, the extremist fringe of an already extremist sect.

As can be seen in the video, the activists are few in number and their efforts have consistently failed to persuade consumers to reject Israeli products. Yet by standing in front of the entrance of Israeli owned stores, intimidating shoppers from stepping inside, it only takes a handful dedicated fanatics to get a stranglehold on a small store. Just a few streets over from the new Sabon outlet is the storefront that was once home to London’s Ahava Dead Sea spa. But in 2011 BDS activists succeeded in hounding Ahava out, not by persuading customers with their arguments, but rather by creating so much noise and disturbance on the salubrious Covent Garden street that–under pressure from surrounding businesses–the building owner eventually discontinued Ahava’s lease. The protesters now seek to do the same to Sabon simply because it, like Ahava and SodaStream, is owned by Israeli Jews.

A few years ago the fierce critic of Israel, Norman Finkelstein, attacked some on his own side, calling BDS “a cult.” It is a cult, but more than that, it’s also a fundamentally racist movement, and that is what the world needs to be hearing about BDS.