The liberal-minded beverage firm used to employ hundreds of locals, until anti-Israel boycott pressure forced the closure of its West Bank factory.
Now the final 75 Palestinian staffers have been fired!
Viva Palestina!!
Two years ago, The Times of Israel reported on SodaStream’s plant at the West Bank industrial zone of Mishor Adumim, where the Israeli carbonated beverage company was employing 1,300 workers.
Of that workforce, 350 were Israeli Jews, 450 were Israeli Arabs and 500 were West Bank Palestinians.
Management and staff confirmed to our reporter that pay and benefits were identical for workers in comparable jobs, irrespective of their citizenship and ethnicity.
On Monday, SodaStream reluctantly announced that it was laying off its last 75 Palestinian workers, having failed to secure permits from the Israeli government for them to work at its new factory in the southern Israeli Bedouin town of Rahat. Under pressure from anti-Israel boycott groups, which launched a ferocious campaign against SodaStream and its spokeswoman Scarlett Johansson, the firm had closed its Mishor Adumim plant last October.
Hundreds of Palestinians who had been treated equitably by a fair-minded decent Israeli firm are now out of work.
Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely opened Israel's battle against the European Union's decision to label Jewish-made products from Judea and Samaria Tuesday, calling the EU out for "discriminating" against the Jewish state.
Earlier Tuesday senior EU officials stated to Arutz Sheva that there was "no room for negotiation" with Israel on the topic of labeling Jewish goods.
Speaking at a press conference in the Barkan Industrial Region in Samaria, where Israelis and Palestinians work side-by-side, Hotovely stated that - despite EU officials' insistence - labeling Jewish-made products was a form of a boycott.
"Today the Foreign Minister is starting a battle against the idea of labeling," she said. "Labeling, it's very clear to say... it's a clear boycotting (of) the State of Israel."
Hotovely noted that targeting one specific region of Israel was essentially tantamount to "boycotting the State itself and creating delegitimization of the State."
She also claimed it marked the start of a slippery slope, again despite the EU's insistence to the contrary. "When you boycott Judea and Samaria you eventually boycott Tel Aviv."
The outspoken deputy minister also called the EU out on its "discriminatory" stance vis-a-vis Israel
"There are over 200 territorial disputes in the world, but the European Union is singling out Israel - this is discrimination, this is a boycott," she declared.
The "majority of Israelis" agree with her, Hotovely asserted.
She also noted that Palestinian employees in Judea and Samaria would be the first to suffer from such a boycott. Those purporting to support"coexistence" could not simultaneously target specifically those businesses which encourage Jews and Arabs to work together, she said.
"You're not harming Israel's economy when you do labeling, what you harm is over 10,000 Palestinian families who are going to lose their jobs."
"Whoever wants coexistence in the Middle East" should oppose the measure, she continued. "Labeling is distancing peace."
Hotovely then turned the incitement from the Palestinian Authority, which has helped fan the flames of the ongoing wave of terrorism buffeting Israel.
"We hear day after day strong incitement against Israelis and Jews - those are the things you need to fight! You need to fight violence, you don't need to fight coexistence.
"Just yesterday an 80-year-old woman was stabbed in the streets of Netanya," she said, apparently mixing up yesterday's attacks in Rishon Letzion and Netanya, both of which targeted elderly Israelis.
"Terrorism doesn't see a difference between the Green Line" and the rest of Israel, she noted.
The mandate of the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign is “to isolate Israel,” a spokeswoman for the movement told The Jerusalem Post on Tuesday.
Interviewed by The Jerusalem Post by phone, Kwara Kekana of BDS South Africa denied accusations leveled by Jewish organizations that her organization is anti-Semitic, a claim heard increasingly as companies such as France’s Orange appear to be buckling under pressure to severe ties with the Jewish state.
The BDS movement’s branch in South Africa has been one of the most vocal worldwide, and has been involved in a series of high profile incidents that have caused vocal outrage among Jewish communal bodies.
In 2013, one of the movement’s leaders justified calls to "shoot the Jew" heard during a protest against a concert by an Israeli musician. During that incident, protesters screamed at concertgoers slogans such as "Israel is apartheid" and "down, down Israel." Some also threw paper at the Jewish attendees.
The call to kill Jews was “just like you would say kill the Boer at [a] funeral during the eighties [and] it wasn’t about killing white people, it was used as a way of identifying with the apartheid regime,” BDS coordinator Muhammed Desai said at the time.
Asked if the group was hostile to Jews, Prof. Farid Esack, writing on behalf of the board of BDS South Africa, expressed his opposition to "any and all incitement to violence and racism – including anti-Semitism and Zionism.”
More recently the movement hosted convicted Palestinian airline hijacker Leila Khaled on a nationwide speaking tour. In an email to supporters, organizers termed her an icon of the Palestinian struggle, showing an image of the PFLP member clutching an automatic weapon and comparing her to late South African president Nelson Mandela.
“Many Palestinians including Leila Khaled are today considered terrorists like the ANC and Nelson Mandela were once classified as terrorists,” the group declared. “The picture of a young, determined looking woman with a checkered keffiyeh scarf, clutching an AK-47, was as era-defining as that of Che Guevara, Ruth First and other political figures from our recent past.”
At the time, Kekana told the Post that she did not expect the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, which condemned the tour, to understand “the meaning of hosting someone like Nelson Mandela, the South African struggle icon, or Leila Khaled, the Palestinian struggle icon.”
The Jewish communal group, she said, had proudly supported the apartheid regime, just as it supports an Israeli “regime that is killing innocent Palestinians.”
Jewish ire at the group continued to build in April, when a diplomatic spat between Pretoria and Jerusalem prompted the BDS movement and allied organizations to threaten to “take it upon ourselves to be at the Israeli Embassy…to expel the Israeli Ambassador.”
The BDS movement also complained about what it called the “Israel lobby.”
Speaking with the Post on Tuesday, however, Kekana denied accusations of anti-Semitism, explaining that the campaign has Jews among its adherents.
“Oftentimes there is a discussion of BDS being anti-Semitic which is completely false. BDS if anything subscribes to peace. Against all forms of racism, which includes anti-Semitism, xenophobia, you can name it,” she said.
Asked if she believed that Israel has a right to exist or if Zionism is a form of racism, she responded by explaining that “the current form that Zionism as an ideology is being applied today” constitutes a “fundamental problem” for her.
Another such fundamental issue is “the way in which Israel wishes to exist at the expense of an indigenous population,” she said. “It wishes to exist in a state that wishes to exclude another group and also wants to exist at the expense of an indigenous population.”
Her mandate, she said, is to “isolate the apartheid state of Israel until it listens to international law” and gives in to three “non-negotiable” demands: the end of its occupation of lands claimed by the Palestinians, the end of “apartheid” and the acceptance of the Palestinian right of return.
Asked if going outside of the framework of negotiations to pressure Israel would make it less likely that a negotiated solution could be reached, she said that the issue of talks was up to the political leadership of the Palestinians and that her only concern was getting Israel to begin “complying with international law.”
Negotiations, she added, have to be undertaken in good faith and cannot go ahead while Arab “political prisoners” remain in Israeli jails or while there is any building in settlements.
Negotiations under such a state are ridiculous, she said, indicating that she believed that negotiations between the two sides could only commence once Israel has been isolated and made to comply with her movement’s demands.
The general consensus among the international community is that issues such as Jerusalem, borders and refugees must be dealt with in negotiations.
Despite the presence of Arabs in the Knesset and the supreme court, she insisted that Israel meets the definition of an apartheid state under a United Nations definition.
Asked how a right of return might be implemented, especially given the Israeli reluctance to give in on a point which many believe to be demographic suicide for the state’s Jewish majority, she said that she did not know what it would mean at the end of the day.
“What is a right of return. I think that we really need to start having those discussions. The preoccupation right now is not about creating peaceful agreements and I don’t think we are there yet. We are not at a point where we need to be discussing what the right of return itself needs to look like. For one, now Israel does not acknowledge the fact that Palestinians have a right to return to indigenous land,” she said.
The idea that Israel is an apartheid state is not restricted to South Africa. In an interview this week with the Arab website Bokra that was also run by 972 Magazine, Omar Barghouti, one of the founders of the international movement, stated that the “Oslo accords disenfranchised Palestinians in the 1948 region, causing a serious rift. On the contrary, the BDS movement insists on the right of all Palestinians to exercise self-determination as a unified people and as such, insists on the rights of all Palestinians, including ‘48 Palestinians.”
“Conflating time-honored, human-rights-based boycotts of Israel’s violations of international law with anti-Jewish racism is not only false, it is a racist attempt to put all Jews into one basket and to implicate them in Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians,” he said.
The boycott and divestment sanctions movement is the new anti-Semitism and wants to destroy Israel, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said Wednesday, in response to a motion to the agenda from coalition and opposition MKs calling to fight those who seek to delegitimize Israel. The discussion was marked by shouting matches over whether BDS is an anti-Israel and anti-Semitic movement or simply seeks to bring an end to Israel's presence in areas liberated in 1967.
"BDS opposes Israel as the Jewish state. It wants to blacken us and destroy us as a Jewish and democratic state," Shaked explained. "The boycotters don't talk about Judea and Samaria, they talk about the state of Israel."
According to Shaked "it's not politically correct to be anti-Semitic today, but it's super-in to be anti-Israel," and as such, "people used to delegitimize the Jews and now they do it to our state."
"BDS is anti-Semitism in new clothes," she added.
Shaked called to fight back against BDS and "boycott the boycotters" and listed the many government ministries, including hers, that are taking part in the efforts to fight delegitimization, bringing MK Bassel Ghattas (Joint List) to interject: "It won't work."
"Israel will continue to be a light unto the nations," Shaked vowed.
Minister-Without-Portfolio Ofir Akunis posited: "Maybe, when radical Islam takes over Europe, people there will understand the real meaning of occupation."
After incessant interruptions from Joint List MKs, Akunis shouted to them: "Your narrative is a lie. It is violent and it encourages terrorism...Your narrative was based on terrorism even before the State of Israel was founded!"
Referring to the ambassadorial appointment Akunis is seeking, MK Ahmed Tibi (Joint List) shouted to Akunis to "go to the UN."
"OK, you go to Arafat's grave and I'll go to the UN. I"m not going to let someone who was an advisor to Arafat lecture me," Akunis said to Tibi, who used to work for the PLO chairman.
MK Nachman Shai (Labor) opened the discussion by saying that diplomatic pressure on apartheid South Africa began with its ejection from FIFA, and that is what the Palestinians were trying to do to Israel.
"We cannot let history repeat itself. If we do not act here and now, if we do not initiate diplomatic processes to break the blockade on us, we will be left alone," he warned.
Yesh Atid MK Aliza Lavie warned that the government does not have a "clear policy, no action, no strategy, no plan with a budget" to fight delegitimization.
"Israel is on the verge of the abyss, yet we're putting out fires instead of taking initiative," she lamented.
MK Michal Rosin repeated statements that BDS is "not against the occupation, they're anti-Semitic" in a mocking tone, adding "oy oy."
"The real issue is the policy of continuing the occupation and managing the conflict," she claimed.
MK Michael Oren (Kulanu), former Ambassador to the US, responded that "this isn't about settlements. BDS wants to erase Israel from the map."
Oren credited NGOs like StandWithUs, CAMERA and AIPAC for doing "holy work" to combat BDS, but criticized the government for "abandoning an important topic for our security."
"We have to take our security into our hands and launch a campaign against this strategic danger, which could become existential," he stated.
Oren called the cancellation of the vote to eject Israel from FIFA a victory, but warned "we cannot rest on our laurels. The danger hasn't passed; it's gotten worse."
Tibi, who took the stand next, asked Oren if he thinks it's alright that Israel doesn't let Palestinian athletes play and whether politics and sports should mix.
"Do you oppose BDS?" Oren retorted.
"Like a real Jew, he answers a question with a question," Tibi quipped.
MK Anat Berko (Likud), pointed out that there is precedent of athletes and other VIPs being allowed out of Gaza taking part in terrorist activities; therefore, athletes must go through checkpoints, as well.
When Berko called Palestinian Football Association President Jibril Rajoub "a terrorist from a family of terrorists," a Joint List MK asked "Who are you to decide?"
Berko is a world-renown expert on terrorism, who lectured on the topic at George Washington University and the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.
The Likud MK recounted that when she and Oren started a caucus to fight delegitimization, the only factions whose members would not join were Meretz and the Joint List.
"We will fight delegitimization from the inside and the outside," she said.
"What does that mean?" Rosin asked.
"That you wouldn't join the battle," Berko retorted. "You're delusional. You think no one tried to delegitimize Israel before 1967?"
Meretz chairwoman Zehava Gal-On took umbrage with some MKs' rhetoric, saying her party "opposes boycotts of Israel, we just can't stand how you act like victims!
"You act like whoever criticizes the occupation is an anti-Semite. Calm down. Netanyahu's policies are what encourages those who boycott us," she stated.
Zionist Union MK Eyal Ben-Reuven pointed out that it was Unity Day, in memory of the three teens murdered by Palestinians last year, and called for MKs to unite to fight delegitimization, saying "there is no coalition and opposition on this matter."
Ghattas, however, disagreed with the sentiment.
"Even some people on the Left need to wake up," he said. "The world is sanctioning Israel because of the occupation."
In his usual flippant fashion, MK Oren Hazan (Likud) said to Joint List MKs: "You're Arab citizens of Israel. If you don't like it here, leave...We're here to stay, I'm not so sure about you.
"People keep talking about the occupation; I don't know about any occupation," he added. "The Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel and not the Ishmaelites."
