The Israeli cosmetics firm Ahava Dead Sea is moving its factory from Mitzpe Shalem to an area outside of Kibbutz Ein Gedi. The move is intended to mitigate the difficulties and the damages the company suffered because of BDS. Ahava’s relocation is a great victory for the movement to boycott the State of Israel.
A few days before the move, Sodastream announced the firing of all its 600 Palestinian Arab workers after the firm’s relocation to the south of Israel (Sodastream was previously based in Mishor Adumim in Judea).
Agrexco was also boycotted and closed because the company had some farms in the Jordan Valley and in Tekoa, “a settlement” at the gates of the Judean desert.
And the list of BDS’ scores doesn’t stop here. It involves Europe’s pension funds, commercial stores and political bodies. Every day in Europe a supermarket decides to remove goods from Israel, so that the label “made in Israel” increasingly appears as a yellow star, a stigma, a shame.
When Israel will wake up? The Israeli establishment’s acquiescence to BDS, especially at the Foreign Ministry, might have a terrible explanation: Israel’s mainstream agrees with BDS that Jews should not be in Judea and it doesn’t fight back against the BDS’ efforts to make Israel and the Jews bleed.
Talk with an Israeli official at the Foreign Ministry and you will get two main and ghastly impressions: BDS is a marginal phenomenon and Israel should have not be in Judea in the first place.
And even those in favour of the Israeli companies’ presence in Judea and Samaria justify that only because of the job opportunities given to the Palestinian Arab citizens.
It is the wrong strategy: Israel should insist that it has the right to work and live in the Biblical heartland and that there is no “occupation”.
The pre or post 1967 lines are just an alibi. One of the symbols and images of BDS shows all of “Palestine”, before and after the Six Day War, surrounded by barbed wire, as if the entire Israel is a single settlement to be dismantled.
Wake up, Israel!