I’ve heard this already a couple times on my book tour: “Hey, we shouldn’t boycott settlement goods. It’ll hurt job prospects for Palestinians!”
To me this sounds exactly like a white Afrikaaner saying, “Hey, if you try to end Apartheid, it’ll hurt the black people we’re kind enough to allow to leave their Bantustans occasionally and work for us at whatever wages we deem appropriate! (It’s not like they have any other prosepects… for some strange reason…)”
An excellent article in the Electronic Intifada picked up this theme and thoroughly demolished this ridiculous argument.
One example they use is a video made by the Israeli company SodaStream, whose main manufacturing facilities are located in an illegal settlements in the West Bank.
The video includes footage of Palestinian workers at the factory, the luxury coach that apparently takes them from their villages to the settlement, the factory “mosque,” and Sodastream chief executive Daniel Birnbaum patting workers on the shoulders and explaining that SodaStream “builds bridges, not walls.”
Responding to the video, the Palestinian Christian organization Kairos Palestine described the vision of reality presented as “cynical at best; at worst, it is criminally misleading.” The letter from Kairos Palestine went on the say “the emphasis on SodaStream’s economic benefits for its workers is, under the circumstances of occupation, absurd and offensive: what Palestinians need is freedom, not fancier oppression. It doesn’t matter if our cage is made of iron or gold: it is a cage.”
In Apartheid South Africa as well, companies that were complicit with the regime tried to adopt a “code of ethics” for continuing to engage with Apartheid:
Several large US companies, including Ford, General Motors, IBM and Union Carbide, signed on immediately, with other companies added later bringing the total to more than 130 endorsers. Ronald Reagan, a strong ally of the regime in South Africa, also supported the Sullivan Principles as part of his “constructive engagement” policy.
A public statement published in 1979 and signed by some 60 religious leaders, trade unions, academics and human rights organizations called into question the true effects of Sullivan’s code of ethics. Titled “The Sullivan Principles: No Cure for Apartheid,” the statement argued that the Sullivan Principles had “developed rapidly into a major defense of US business activity in South Africa” and were being used to undermine divestment campaigns.
The signatories of the statement argued that firms tended to endorse the Sullivan Principles “not as a result of genuine change in corporate attitudes but as a public relations effort,” providing “precisely what the companies were looking for: a guaranteed public relations success which promised maximum credit for minimum change.” The reforms proposed by the code, which were voluntary and provided no means for enforcement, were confined to the workplace and raised no objections to the system of apartheid that was the source of injustice in South Africa. “Africans are not struggling and dying to reform apartheid,” the statement added. “They want nothing less than the abolition of the system.”
Ten years later, Sullivan [the original creator of the “code of ethics”] abandoned his principles, disappointed that they had not had the expected impact. Sullivan instead called on companies to withdraw completely from all business activities in South Africa and on the US government to impose sanctions…
SodaStream, along with other supporters of oppression, occupation and apartheid, are using Palestinian workers in an attempt to give legitimacy to an unjust system, reinforcing the idea that Palestinians should make do with a job, rather than fight for every right they are due.
Next time someone suggests that taking steps to end the occupation — steps requested by the Palestinians themselves — will hurt Palestinians, be sure to remind them of these realities.
Or just say what I tend to say: “Hey, you know what hurts job prospects for Palestinians? A neverending military occupation that denies them basic human rights, including the right to develop their own economy.”
Daniel Birnbaum CEO of Soda Stream is a proven liar, when Empire, which sells the Soda Stream devices in Sweden, said it was not aware that the factory was located in a settlement, and added that it had informed Soda Stream that Empire did not want the factory to stay there. Mr Daniel Birnbaum CEO of Soda Stream, was asked for comments by the National Swedish radio, he said Soda Stream “will supply the Scandanavian markets with products from any of our 7 facilities other than the Mishor plant” This is an outright lie, the Mishor plant is the only one that manufactures the main carbonating devices, apart from a few small components which are outsourced to China.
It has a small operation in Ashkelon in Israel but this only produces the syrups which are extras to the main device. see Soda Stream, who profits.
You know, Pamela, your friend Abbas, couple of years back, wanted to stop Palestinians from working in any business (espec. construction) in the W.Bank. Nothing ever came of it, and he was opposed by his own people, for lack of jobs elsewhere. You could, of course, argue the PA economy doesn’t grow sufficiently d/t the occupation, and no doubt there’s truth in that. There is some foreign investment in the W.Bank, and some wealthy Palestinians in the “diaspora” have returned to start businesses, too. Yet, many more companies are reluctant, because of the terrible corruption and lack of transparency. I.E.-money doesn’t go where it should, ends up in some powerful peoples’ pockets, and no lawyer can help you. To a large degree, that is true of some current east European economies as well. The PA needs to modernize and bring its own house into order, aside from the severely curtailed freedom of speech there, before international companies flock to invest. Yes, there’s definitely a pool of well educated talent there, but their own (long overdue election) “government” stifles necessary investment through their own faults.
Hi Pamela, Good to learn a bit about your tour experiences. I missed the Tattered Cover event, the storm, I live 180 from Denver, hope to see you in Boulder tomorrow.
I am hoping you would come to the BDS conference Saturday, http://www.coloradobdscampaign.org/events.html?r=20130319211823 ?
Just don’t buy anything that says “made in Israel” on it.
Pamela, opinion is still divided as to the extent to which sanctions could really be said to be responsible for ending Apartheid in South Africa.
The economist Thomas .W. Hazlett has written on the subject, and he believes other factors mainly internal to South Africa were what made Apartheid ultimately unsustainable.
According to Hazlett, the main external pressure which contributed to an end to South African apartheid was not sanctions but was the collapse of Soviet Union and Communism.
He believes the sanctions that were imposed had much less effect than you seem to think.
“Did international sanctions against South Africa force Pretoria’s hand in these reforms? The evidence is virtually unanimous that progress was only modestly correlated at best, and negatively correlated at worst, with such foreign campaigns. Not only did sanctions fail to lower South African trade flows from their previous levels, but GNP growth actually accelerated after the European Community and the United States imposed sanctions (in September and October 1986, respectively). Perversely, South African businesses reaped at least $5 billion to $10 billion in windfalls as Western firms disinvested at fire sale prices between 1984 and 1989.”
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Apartheid.html
“Whatever the economic impact, the immediate political effect of sanctions was to encourage retrenchment by the Botha regime then in power. Right-wing (proapartheid) support rose sharply in the May 1987 parliamentary elections, and the National Party government responded by shelving all reforms and brutally suppressing antiapartheid dissent, initiating a state of emergency accompanied by sweeping press censorship. Only with a fading of sanctions pressures, a rebounding economy, and key changes in the international geopolitical environment (notably, the collapse of the Eastern bloc) did the course of reform reassert itself.”