Things That Just Make Me Mad

The movement to boycott Israel and Israeli goods is simply stupid. Where is the movement to boycott the Palestinians who are teaching their children to kill Jews and instigating stabbing attacks in Israel? The people behind the boycott are either uninformed, anti-Semetic, or simply stupid. Now their boycott has hurt the very people they claim to support.

Townhall.com posted an Associated Press story about SodaStream, an Israeli company that has been impacted by boycotts against Israel.

In September of 2014, I posted the following:

According to Birnbaum (Daniel Birnbaum, CEO of SodaStream), SodaStream is the “largest employer of Palestinian people in the world outside of the Palestinian Authority.”

“We employ 500 Palestinians here. Side by side, we have 350 Israeli Arabs and another 300 Israeli Jews. And we get along together. They’re not killing each other! They go to lunch break. We break bread together and we get to know each other,” he said.

SodaStream pays Israeli wages — four times what workers would earn in the Palestinian Authority, where unemployment is 30 percent.  And the workers say they’re happy, too.

Yousef Besharat is a Palestinian Arab who works at the factory. He told CBN News his salary helped him to build a home in just a year. He said there’s no discrimination between Jewish and Arab workers at the plant.

The article at Townhall.com reported today:

The chief executive of SodaStream International Ltd. says he has been forced to lay off hundreds of Palestinian workers after a factory was targeted by an international boycott movement and moved from the West Bank into Israel.

CEO Daniel Birnbaum said the last 74 Palestinian workers left Monday after being denied permits to work inside Israel at the new factory.

The global boycott movement seeks to ostracize Israel by lobbying corporations, artists and academic institutions to sever ties with the Jewish state.

In all, about 500 Palestinians lost their jobs after the factory moved last year following a high-profile boycott campaign against SodaStream.

Birnbaum said Palestinian workers are the main victims of the boycott. But he also criticized the government for not granting the work permits.

Until the stabbing attacks in Israel stop, I think the government is correct in not granting work permits. However, the impact of the boycott is to remove a company where Israelis and Palestinians were working together in harmony. That company was making a good first step toward peace in the region. The boycott also results in economic hardship for the Palestinians that the boycott claims to support. That makes no sense. If the people doing the boycotting were attempting to bring peace to Israel and the surrounding countries, they just shot themselves in the foot.