Haaretz reports:
Abigail Disney, a descendant of one of the Disney Company founders, has announced that she is disclaiming her share of the family’s investment in the Israeli cosmetics company Ahava, due to the fact that it is located in the West Bank and is engaged in the “exploitation of occupied natural resources.”
Disney announced Monday that she will donate the profits and a sum equal to the worth of her shares to “organizations working to end this illegal exploitation.” Disney, 52, a filmmaker and businesswoman, is the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, who co-founded The Walt Disney Company with his brother Walt.
Her move, however, has more of a symbolic significance than a financial one. Shamrock Holdings, the family firm in which she is a partner, has demonstrated a distinct interest in investing in Israel, as evidenced by the wide-ranging activity of its Israeli affiliate, Shamrock Israel.
According to various media reports, Shamrock has invested some $400 million in Israeli companies – about a fifth of its capital. It has invested at least $12 million in Ahava, which is based in Kibbutz Mitzpe Shalem, an Israeli settlement located on the Dead Sea in the West Bank.
After informing her family and partners in the firm of her decision, Disney released the following statement:
“Recent evidence from the Israeli Civil Administration documents that Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories sources mud used in its products from the occupied shores of the Dead Sea, which is in direct contravention to provisions in the Hague Regulations and the Geneva Convention forbidding the exploitation of occupied natural resources.
“While I will always hold my colleagues and coworkers in the highest regard, I cannot in good conscience profit from what is technically the ‘plunder’ or ‘pillage’ of occupied natural resources and the company’s situating its factory in an Israeli settlement in the Occupied West Bank.
“Because of complicated legal and financial constraints I am unable to withdraw my investment at this time, but will donate the corpus of the investment as well as the profits accrued to me during the term of my involvement to organizations working to end this illegal exploitation.”
Haaretz adds:
Shamrock also has a stake in the Teva Naot footwear company, which is located in the Etzion Bloc south of Jerusalem, and in the Orad company, which makes, among other things, control and monitoring technology for the separation barrier running through the West Bank.
Good for Mickey and Donald! Now, Uncle Sam should rip off his uncomfortable and ridiculous yarmaka and don the old Mickey ears.
Great news!
Well at least that’s something.
I can understand there may be legal hurdles in the way Shamrock was set up originally that prevent her from being able to divest and from forcing any divestment.
But still, yes her statement is worth a lot. And being a ‘Disney’ makes it carry more public weight and influence.
Ahava will die at the hands of BDS.
Of all the Israeli companies that make money from oppression it is the most obnoxious. Selling feel good cosmetics manufactured using raw materials that are sourced at gunpoint. All it has to defend itself is the antisemitism slur. Image is everything for cosmetics. It is a bullshit industry anyway but Ahava takes the crap to a totally different level.
This is certainly encouraging news as I remember hearing Bernie the Attorney talk about dinners with his first wife’s family in Pacific Palisades CA. They were well-off stock cut from Disney family money and even the trust fund kids talked about how much better they were than the hoi polloi. He said their basic attitude was that their wealth was because they deserved/earned it, whereas those unable to reach similar pinnacles of financial prosperity were doomed by nothing more sinister than their own laziness and lack of ingenuity. It was their destiny to be the leaders of their inferiors.
He said they, almost to a person, disgusted him with their jewel-encrusted rose-colored blinders.
Am I quite pleased to learn of Abigail Disney’s commendable sense of integrity.