{"id":7922,"date":"2014-02-20T09:39:50","date_gmt":"2014-02-20T09:39:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/?p=7922"},"modified":"2014-02-20T09:39:50","modified_gmt":"2014-02-20T09:39:50","slug":"boycott-divestment-and-sanctions-against-the-zionist-regime-turning-mainstream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/boycott-divestment-and-sanctions-against-the-zionist-regime-turning-mainstream\/","title":{"rendered":"Boycott, divestment and sanctions against the Zionist regime turning mainstream"},"content":{"rendered":"

Boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) are big news in 2014. If Scarlett Johansson’s Sodastream fiasco didn’t grab your attention, perhaps\u00a0the American Studies Association’s boycott<\/a>\u00a0of Israeli universities did, or\u00a0Netanyahu’s increasing talk<\/a>\u00a0of million-dollar PR\u00a0campaigns, legal offensives and diplomacy efforts to counter the BDS threat. Opinion pages\u00a0are filled<\/a>\u00a0with debate<\/a>, John Kerry has warned Israel that it could be facing a delegitimization campaign “on steroids” and voices\u00a0from all sides<\/a>\u00a0are speculating<\/a>\u00a0that a boycott movement against Israel could be about to break into the mainstream.<\/p>\n

But what would that actually mean in supermarkets and shopping baskets?\u00a0The BDS campaign<\/a>\u00a0covers all Israeli products: It’s a broad tactic, aimed to pressure the state itself to change. But it also reserves a special focus for companies that are actually involved in \u2014 and make hefty profits from \u2014 occupation policies. These organizations may be forced to pay attention to the boycott very soon \u2014 and they may not be the ones you’d expect.<\/p>\n

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1.\u00a0Sodastream<\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Thanks to Scarlett Johansson’s recent adventure in international politics, most of us now know about Sodastream’s role in perpetuating the occupation of the West Bank. The fizzy drinks makers are produced in Ma’ale Adumim, one of the many illegal Israeli settlements that cuts through Palestinian land, seizing resources and making the development of an independent Palestinian economy look impossible. “The Israeli army forcefully expelled 200 Palestinian families from their homes to make space for the construction of Maale Adumim,”\u00a0says<\/a>\u00a0Rafeef Ziadah, a spokesperson for the BDS National Committee. “Recently, it announced a plan to expel another 2,300 Palestinians to make way for the settlement\u2019s growth.”<\/p>\n

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2.\u00a0Jaffa Oranges\"\"<\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Brands like\u00a0Carmel Agrexco<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Mehadrin<\/a>, which export the famous Jaffa brand of oranges, make big profits from farming on Palestine’s land. Many of the companies’ fruits and vegetables\u00a0\u2014 which include avocados, sweet potatoes and pomegranates\u00a0\u2014 are grown and packaged in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank,\u00a0where 94% of land is under direct Israeli control<\/a>. As well as violating international law, commercial farming in the area deprives Palestinians of agriculturally-rich farmland and seriously limits access to water, which local people are often forced to buy by the tank at vastly inflated prices.<\/p>\n

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3.\u00a0Ahava<\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Ahava means love in Hebrew, but the story behind is unromantic. The company’s major factory \u2014 and its plush visitors’ centre \u2014 is based in Mitzpe Shalem, a settlement in the occupied West Bank that\u00a0also owns 37% of the brand<\/a>. The location gives Ahava privileged access to the minerals and mud of the Dead Sea, which form the big-selling ingredient in their face masks, body scrubs and moisturisers. The company\u00a0makes about $150 million a year<\/a>from the sale of these miraculous products while Palestinians continue to be effectively barred from utilising the resources of the Dead Sea.<\/p>\n

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4.\u00a0Golan Heights Wine<\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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According to its\u00a0website<\/a>, this winery is located in Israel’s prime location for world-class vineyards. Unfortunately, however, that place is the Golan Heights:\u00a0occupied territory<\/a>\u00a0seized from Syria in the 1967 War. Then, most of the 140,000 Syrians that lived in the Golan were displaced and have not been allowed to return, and today the area is home to some 20,000 settlers. Although the Golan Heights Winery is one of Israel’s biggest exporters,\u00a0it’s far from the only producer of settlement wine<\/a>. The Carmel, Tshibi and Barkan wineries all own vineyards in the Golan Heights, while Teperberg 1870 and Binyamina operate in the West Bank.<\/p>\n

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5.\u00a0Victoria’s Secret\"\"<\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Victoria’s Secret is targeted by BDS campaigners because of where the brand sources its fabrics. America’s largest brand of lingerie gets its textiles from Delta Galil Industries,\u00a0a company with a warehouse in the Barkan Industrial Zone<\/a>, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. It also runs stores in Ma’aleh Adumim and Pisgat Ze’ev \u2014 both in occupied territories.\u00a0Settlements like these destroy the contiguity of a future Palestinian state and are widely considered to be the biggest obstacle to the success of the peace process.\u00a0Victoria’s Secret, however, is not the only company to buy its materials from the settlement industry:Delta Galil also supplies to companies<\/a>\u00a0like\u00a0Walmart, Calvin Klein, Nike and Columbia, among others.<\/p>\n

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6.\u00a0Sabra Hummus\"\"<\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Food appropriation is a big deal in the Middle East, where the adoption of falafel and hummus as Israel’s national snacks is a point of contention for Palestinians. Sabra, however, is a BDS target for other reasons: The\u00a0USA’s top hummus manufacturer is owned by Strauss Group, an Israeli company with strong ties to the IDF. The corporation has “adopted” the Golani Brigade, an “elite unit” of the Israeli Army with a reputation for bad behavior that ranges “from revolts against commanders to abuse of Palestinians<\/a>,” according to\u00a0Haaretz<\/em>. Golani troops were on the front line in Operation Cast Lead, the 2008-9 assault on Gaza which killed some 1,400 Palestinians. Strauss, apparently, provided the lunches,\u00a0exclaiming on its website\u00a0<\/a>that it provides “food products” for missions and “personal care packages for each soldier.” After U.S. BDS groups targeted Sabra in 2010, Strauss removed the wording from its Corporate Social Responsibility pages. But it has said nothing of withdrawing its support for IDF troops.<\/p>\n

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7.\u00a0Medjool Dates\"\"<\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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These super-sweet dates are a Palestinian staple, traditionally eaten to break the Ramadan fast. But today, over half the global harvest of medjool dates is produced by Israel, often on settlements in Palestinian land and especially in the Jordan Valley. There, illegal labor practices have been recorded on a significant scale;\u00a0in 2008, 7,000 Palestinian children\u00a0were found to be working on settlement date farms<\/a>. What’s more, the provenance of settlement dates is often concealed with a “produced in Israel” label \u2014\u00a0Hadiklaim<\/a>, one of the biggest settlement producers, markets its products under the brand names Jordan River, Jordan River Bio-Tops and King Solomon.<\/p>\n

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8.\u00a0Eden Springs Water\"\"<\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Much of Eden Springs’ bottled water \u2014\u00a0which is widely marketed to universities, local authorities and other institutions \u2014 comes from\u00a0the Salukia spring in the Golan Heights<\/a>.Israel’s occupation of the Golan\u00a0has been condemned by the U.N.<\/a>, and, as\u00a0Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem reminds us<\/a>, international law only gives occupiers a limited right to use the water resources of occupied territory. Despite that, settlers in the Golan can\u00a0use as much as 17 times<\/a>\u00a0more water per capita than the area’s other inhabitants \u2014 a state of affairs that is not helped by the commercial exploitation of springs.<\/p>\n

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9.\u00a0Hewlett Packard\"\"<\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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Hewlett Packard’s slogan is a predictably Silicon Valley coinage: “If you’re going to do something, make it matter.” For Palestinians, however, some of the things HP does matter more than others. The firm owns EDS Israel,\u00a0which supplies the computer systems of the Israeli Ministry of Defense<\/a>\u00a0and produces hi-tech equipment like the Basel System, a biometric permit system that controls the movement of Palestinian workers through checkpoints in Gaza and the West Bank. HP equipment is used by Israeli prisons and the army, and the company has also invested in the technological development of illegal settlements, taking part in the\u00a0Smart City project in Ariel<\/a>.<\/p>\n

View – http:\/\/www.policymic.com\/mobile\/articles\/81363\/9-brands-you-can-boycott-to-hold-israel-accountable-for-its-violation-of-international-law<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) are big news in 2014. If Scarlett Johansson’s Sodastream fiasco didn’t grab your attention, perhaps\u00a0the American Studies Association’s boycott\u00a0of Israeli universities did, or\u00a0Netanyahu’s increasing talk\u00a0of million-dollar PR\u00a0campaigns, legal offensives and diplomacy efforts to counter the BDS threat. Opinion pages\u00a0are filled\u00a0with debate, John Kerry has warned Israel that it could be …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7932,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":1,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,2],"tags":[166,162,136,156,1425,111,163],"class_list":["post-7922","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-lectures","category-news-and-analysis","tag-boycott","tag-headline","tag-israel","tag-israeli-war-crimes","tag-palestine","tag-sanctions","tag-ticker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7922"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7922\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7934,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7922\/revisions\/7934"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7932"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilayah.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}