BDS Kills Palestinian Jobs

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is designed to destroy Israel … non-violently. Beneath the talk about ending the occupation lies an insistence on what is called a right of return, a right for Palestinians to recover the property they lost when Israel was founded nearly seven decades ago.

At that point, there would be no Israel. When you can’t compete economically and can’t win militarily, you use the politics of resentment to achieve your ends.

Of course, if the BDS movement and its sympathizers devoted themselves to building a better economy and a more just society in the Palestinian territories, we would not be having this debate. And yet, like Hamas in Gaza, the movement devotes its energy and effort to trying to destroy Israel.

Hamas did it by building terror tunnels and stockpiling rockets. Apparently, the humiliation of having lost out to the Jewish state and the humiliation of looking like a civilizational failure next to the Jewish state is too much to bear. Pride will only be restored by deconstructing the Jewish state. BDSers do it by trying to undermine Israel politically, culturally and economically. 

We understand that BDSers do not care about practical consequences. They do not care about whether Palestinians have jobs and earn a living. They have now won a victory, forcing SodaStream to move a factory out of the occupied West Bank, where it employed hundreds of Palestinians, into Israeli territory.

The New York Post reports the story in an editorial:

To serve “Palestine,” Palestinians must suffer: Such, at least, is the logic of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which just forced SodaStream to move its carbonation-machine factory out of the West Bank and into Israel’s Negev desert.

It’s a big win for the BDSers, and a loss for the people they claim to support: Palestinians, hundreds of whom just lost their jobs.

“I like it here. It’s good work. It’s good money,” said Ahmed Abdel Wahid, one of only 36 Palestinians who worked at the West Bank factory to get a job at the new plant. “We are treated as equals here.”

BDS leaders don’t care. “This is a clear-cut BDS victory against an odiously complicit Israeli company,” said Omar Barghouti, co-founder of the movement.

Funnily enough, SodaStream used to be “the largest private employer of Palestinians in the world.” And you know private enterprise is bad, so we can’t have that:

SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum doesn’t see what’s so moral here: “We were the most advanced, technological and largest factory in the West Bank, period. We were the largest private employer of Palestinians in the world, period. How can you fight that? How can you argue that’s bad for the Palestinians?”

Apparently, because the BDS crew cares more about abstract lines on a map — and proving its own power — than about people’s lives.