Opuscula “Palestinians” Want jobs, respect

ACCORDING TO ONE ISRAELI SOURCE¹, Arab human rights activist Bassem Eid believes peace between Israel and the Arabs can exist only on the basis of economic cooperation.

"I live in the territories, Eid said, and know what people think. Most of the Palestinians are looking for respect and not identity - I see how many people are trying to get a job, to live, and raise their children with dignity."

THE PROBLEM FOR “PALESTINIANS” in Israel (vs. Israeli Arabs) are two-fold.

1. European leaders, Eid continued, have embraced a false vision of the conflict, as well as the needs of Palestinian Authority residents: "We need to explain to European Parliament members the true picture, and we must make it clear to them that it's forbidden to use Palestinians for political purposes. Unfortunately, Europe is still impervious to our message, but we're trying to appear in its institutions and stimulate their thoughts.

2. Arab Members of Knesset. "They don't represent the interests of the Palestinians, they were chosen by the Israeli Arabs and not by the residents of the West Bank or East Jerusalem. The Arab Knesset members don't represent me; I live in the Palestinian population and have nothing to do with the Joint List in the Israeli Knesset."

Don’t forget BDS

Although Eid did not mention it by name, the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement plays a large role in keeping “Palestinians” from the jobs that would provide them with the economic opportunities “to live and raise their children with dignity.”

Case in point: SodaStream.

The Israeli company was located in the so-called West Bank. It employed both Arabs from the PA and Jews from Israel. Equal pay for equal work. The staffing was roughly 50% Arab and 50% Jewish. Workers, by all accounts, respected each other and peacefully coexisted on the job.

Enter BDS.

By instigating the leftists of Europe and the U.S. – and those in Israel as well – the BDS forced SodaStream out of the West Bank. When it left, it left 500 workers from the PA stranded sans employment. Unhappily for the BDS movement, it did NOT force SodaStream out of business.

Since belong forced out by BDS, SodaStream relocated to the south and now employs Israeli Arabs and Jews. The PA’s loss is the south’s gain. Meanwhile, SodaStream has been sold to beverage giant PepsiCo for US$3.2 billion.

Education to the rescue

There are a number of private and Israeli government programs to help being both Israeli Arabs and PA Arabs into technology fields,

Israeli hospitals continue to educate Arabs in the medical arts. “Continue” because there is a long history of Arab doctors training in Israeli hospitals. (I once had an ophthalmologist who studied at Hadassah in Jerusalem.)

Fortunately for the PA Arabs, the BDS bigots cannot prevent the residents of the PA from taking advantage of Israeli-offered opportunities.

Even “blue collar” workers from the PA earn better wages in Israel than their brothers who work in the PA, ergo the number of PA Arabs who travel to and from Israel on a daily basis.

Unfortunately, the reality on the ground and the pipe dreams of the leftists are different. The real victims of the leftists’ are the people they claim to be helping.

Given their choice – assuming Eid is correct – PA residents could have economic dignity and peace with Israel. Sadly, the choice is not theirs to make; it belongs to the PA’s politicians and the world’s leftists, most of whom have been no closer to the PA than New York, London, Moscow, or Berlin.

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Sources

1. http://tinyurl.com/ydz7k8re

PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.

Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. Defamation is a false statement of fact. If the statement was accurate, then by definition it wasn’t defamatory.

Comments on What “Palestinians” want

Wait for it How loudly will Liberals scream? SodaStream move from "West Bank" Will leave Palestinians without a job

 

Be careful for what you wish.

The BDS*ers wanted SodaStream to be blackballed for having an operation in Occupied Israel, a/k/a the west bank of the Jordan River.

Never mind that SodaStream employed both Israeli Jews and PA Muslims in equal numbers; no matter that SodaStream offered equal pay for equal work.

The BDSers wanted to punish SodaStream for daring to have an operation in Occupied Israel.

So now SodaStream is pulling out and moving to the south.

The BDSers won, but did their clients, the Muslims of the PA who soon will be unemployed?

According to an article in the Times of Israel, Ramah Kudaimi, membership and outreach coordinator for the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, which represents 400 organizations said today’s news is just the latest sign that these global BDS campaigns are having an impact on changing the behavior of companies that profit from Israeli occupation and apartheid.

Apartheid? Working together for equal pay is apartheid? I think Mr. Kudaimi need to revisit a dictionary. **

The article continues: But Kudaimi’s group, as well as the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee, say they will continue to boycott SodaStream because they claim its new factory abets dispossession of Bedouin land in Israel, even though the factory will be in an existing industrial park.

Instead of PA employees, SodaStream will have to hire Bedu for diversity, assuming they want to work in a factory rather than remain on the land.

Israel is at once trying to increase the Jewish population in the south and to wean the Bedu from their nomadic lifestyle. Like the Roma of Europe, this may be easier said than done, and in the end, if they Bedu don't violate Israeli law, they probably will be able to keep their old ways.

One thing is clear: no matter is Israel were to withdraw completely from its land - as it did in Gaza - the liberal, anti-Israel voices would not be stilled. It's not where Jews live, its THAT Jews live - period.

The leadership of the PA - with or without Hamas - make it abundantly clear with their frequent calls to wipe Israel off the map and all the Jews with it.

And Israel's supposed to make peace with these people? Only in Obama's dreams.

 

* BDS = Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

** Apartheid, according to Merriam-Webster online is defined as:
racial segregation; segregation or separation
SodaStream does NOT qualify as an apartheid organization.

Some things to consider During Apartheid Week

As college and university campuses around the world - including Hebrew University! - enjoy the annual Israel-bashing "Apartheid Week" it seems appropriate to recap some recent news about Israel and the Arabs within Israel and within the PA.

Starting with Hebrew U.

Headline: Apartheid Week' Hits Hebrew University

Read article and view photos at: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/177883#.Uw35cuNdX8g

Excerpts: Aid Golan, the head of the university's Ta Lava pro-Likud student group, told Arts Shiva that Arab students were behind the defamatory exhibit, which is located in a central hallway frequented daily by the university's regents. The Arab students put up photos depicting the IDF negatively with insightful texts, reports Golan. The texts define IDF soldiers as "hunters of freedom," call Israel "Palestine," and the IDF an "occupying army."

"One particularly colorful photo text describes the picture as being of a mother crying for her shahid (martyr) son who was killed by the "occupation army." Sections of the Arab text declare that "Palestine will be liberated."

Golan voiced surprise that Arab students, who study freely in the Israeli university and enjoy "affirmative action" in being accepted to the school and into work afterwards, dare to cry of "apartheid" and "racism."

Shocking news

Headline: PA: Israel Not Cutting Electricity, Giving More

Read article at: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/177884

Excerpts: A senior member of the Palestinian Authority (PA) electricity committee on Wednesday morning denied talk of Israel cutting off power to the PA, given the PA's 1.4 billion shekels ($400 million) in unpaid bills to the Israel Electric Corporation (IEC).

"The electric company hasn't threatened to cut off the PA from electric supply," said the senior official to Arabic news source Ma'an.

The PA acquires 95% of its electricity in Judea and Samaria and 75% of its electricity in Gaza from Israel.

The "shocking" thing is that a PA official (!) stood up for the "apartheid enemy."

Water, water, not everywhere

EU Parliament President Martin Schulz , citing PA statistics, told Israel's parliament that the amount of water available to the average Israeli unfairly overwhelms the amount of water available to the average Palestinian..

Headline: Report: PA Weaponizing Water Against Israel

Read article at: http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/report-pa-weaponizing-water-against-israel/2014/02/26/

Excerpts: The Palestinian Authority is using water as a weapon against the State of Israel, states a new report titled The Truth Behind the Palestinian Water Libels (PDF), issued by Prof. Haim Gvirtzman from the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies..

What are the causes of Palestinian water supply problems? Today, the Palestinians consume some 200 million cubic meters of water per annum in Judea and Samaria, Prof. Gvirtzman reports. The Palestinians could easily raise that amount by at least 50 percent, without any additional assistance or allocation from the State of Israel. His short answer: Water shortages in the Palestinian Authority are the result of Palestinian policies that deliberately waste water and destroy the regional water ecology. The Palestinians refuse to develop their own significant underground water resources, build a seawater desalination plant, fix massive leakage from their municipal water pipes, build sewage treatment plants, irrigate land with treated sewage effluents or modern water-saving devices, or bill their own citizens for consumer water usage, leading to enormous waste.

Boycott Israeli products … made by PA Arabs

An article that tries hard to be anti-SodaStream and anti-Israel has its moment of truth and admits that Soda Stream and some other Israeli-owned businesses are proving coexistence is possible - at least in the workplace.

Headline: What SodaStream's Palestinian Employees Think About Scarlett Johansson

Read article at: http://gawker.com/what-sodastreams-palestinian-employees-think-about-sca-1513475552

Excerpts: In a Huffington Post blog post defending her association with SodaStream, Johansson said she's "proud of the...quality of their product and work environment," and said the factory places Israelis and Palestinians together side-by-side in cooperation. That frankly sounds too kumbaya to be true, but a similar sentiment was actually volunteered without prompting by the Palestinian workers here.

"Hell yeah, I'm happy. We're like family. We have fun,'' said Mohammed Yousef, 22, from the Palestinian village of Jaba. "We are Jews and Muslims here. We are here peacefully. We have no problems. Everyone is complaining about settlements here and everywhere, but SodaStream is different.''

Just a two-minute drive away from the industrial zone is a small strip of Israeli retailers featuring a discount Rami Levy supermarket chain that also employees Palestinians from the West Bank.

According to Wassim Siam, a 26-year-old quality-control employee at Soda Stream, "I talk a lot to friends abroad. They say, 'You are an Arab. How can you work there?'" he said. "Nobody knows there are 1,000 people and their lives will be turned upside down by the [boycott]. You are killing them, so stop it.''

Israeli Arabs have no voice?

Headline: Fuming Arab MKs storm out of debate on Temple Mount

Read article at: http://www.timesofisrael.com/enraged-arab-mks-storm-out-of-debate-on-temple-mount/#ixzz2uRTLZLvN

Excerpts: Discussing a proposed policy change that would allow Jews to pray on the Temple mount, Arab MK Jamal Zahalke (Balad) interjected, “There is no such thing as the Temple Mount, there is only the al-Aqsa Mosque,” setting off a shouting match between members of the Jewish and Arab parties.

MKs Zahalke, Ahmad Tibi (Ta’al), Mohammed Barakeh (Hadash) and Afou Agbaria (Hadash) began shouting at committee chairwoman MK Miri Regev (Likud), with Tibi calling her a pyromaniac and “a contemptible settler.”

“What is this, you insolent person!” Tibi shouted at Regev. After Tibi refused to apologize, Regev responded, “Fortunately I don’t need to earn respect from them,” further fanning the flames.

“What do you mean ‘them’?” Tibi retorted. “Who is ‘them’ — the Arabs?”

Leaving the hall, Barakeh jabbed a finger in Regev’s direction, saying, “Anyone who comes to desecrate the al-Aqsa Mosque will find us there and not here.”

Tell me again how Israel mistreats the Muslims within its borders and within the so-called PA.

And tell me again how much better it is for an Arab, especially a PA Muslim, to live in ANY Islamic country.

I have seen an obviously Muslim family calmly stroll along a Haifa-area beach while Israel's Muslim neighbors were sending rockets into Haifa. No Jews bothered the Muslims; no harassment, no cat calls. The family was, after all, Israeli and despite the rocket attacks, there appeared no hostility to this family.

Anyone care to venture a guess how an obviously Jewish person would be treated under the same circumstances in any Islamic country?

Oxfam: Politically blind Or anti-peace in Mid-East

It seems hatred of anything "Israel" blinds eyes to reality.

The whole Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel is, at best, short-sighted and, at worst, hinders any possibility of the elusive "peace in the middle east."

Case in point: Oxfam's boycott of SodaStream.

Oxfam is upset because a formerly British company, now owned by Israelis, is situated in what a BBC employee termed an area that "Under most interpretations of international law - although not Israel's - building homes and businesses on such territory is illegal." Never mind that the statement is false; it's the BBC after all.

Oxfam insists - based on input from Palestine Solidarity Campaign , that SodaStream is treating its Palestinian employees badly, that the mere fact the company is located on land (a) originally on the Israeli side of the UN partition plan and (b) captured during Jordan's war of aggression in 1967.

Apparently it was inconvenient for Oxfam and the BBC to visit the SodaStream site in Ma'ale Adumim; perhaps they couldn’t get past the stop sign (see photograph from article, below).

Guess which buildings in the picture are "pre-49" and "post-49." Click on the photo to see a larger version.

The leed paragraph of a Judy Maltz article in the left-leaning Israeli newspaper HaAretz seems to portend a balanced presentation of the Oxfam-SodaStream issue. The reporter wrote:

"SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum on Sunday accused Oxfam of providing funding to the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaign against Israel and said that an invitation he recently issued to the president of the organization to visit the company’s West Bank factory had been “ignored.”"

Birnbaum suggested that the reason American actress Scarlett Johansson dumped Oxfam in favor of representing SodaStream was "perhaps because of financial motivations, they are prepared to sacrifice the jobs of 1,300 people, including 950 Palestinians and Arabs, and I cannot see, and she cannot see either, how that would advance peace and humanity in the region.”

The HaAretz article continued:

" In response to this charge, the Oxfam spokesman said: “Oxfam wants to see a just and lasting agreement that allows Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace and security. We support a two-state solution, and we believe that settlements in the West Bank are an obstacle to achieving that peace. Any company located in the settlements contributes to their viability and legitimizes them. This is not about labor practices or SodaStream in particular, but the bigger issue of settlements, which continue to take land and resources from Palestinian communities that we work with. Some Palestinians in the West Bank do find work in Israeli settlements, but this is often because they are restricted from pursuing other livelihoods and have little other choice. For example, Oxfam works in Palestinian farming communities – they have lost much of their land to settlements and they are rarely allowed to build new wells or get enough water. Unable to make a living, their only option is often found in settlement factories and farms, which receive government tax breaks, support, and don’t face any of the restrictions on building and development that Palestinian communities nearby do.” "

When reporters do visit

Unlike the BBC writers working from anti-Israel handouts, a Times of Israel article led off with:

MISHOR ADUMIM, Israel — The SodaStream factory, situated just off the highway leading down from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea, was abuzz on Sunday with journalists from across the globe trying to get a glimpse of the action.

"The tour of the carbonated beverage-maker plant was organized especially for curious foreign correspondents on the eve of the Super Bowl, which featured an ad starring its glamorous spokeswoman Scarlett Johansson. The factory, SodaStream’s charismatic US-born CEO Daniel Birnbaum proudly declared, used to produce munitions for the Israeli army. It was bought in 1996 by the fizzy drink start-up, seeking to better the world by doing away with polluting plastic bottles.

The article continues:

Today, the Mishor Adumim plant — the first of eight Israeli locations and 22 worldwide — employs 1,300 workers; 950 Arabs (450 Israeli and 500 Palestinian) and 350 Israeli Jews. Salaries and work benefits — management asserts and workers confirm — are equal for all workers in comparable jobs, regardless of ethnicity or citizenship. The factory secures Israeli work permits for its Palestinian employees as well as rides from their home and back, SodaStream’s Chief Operating Officer Yossi Azarzar told The Times of Israel.

Palestinians and Israelis work at the SodaStream factory in the Mishor Adumim industrial park, February 2, 2014. (Photo credit: Nati Shohat/Flash90)

Birnbaum, the CEO, was clearly cognizant of the dispute. He spoke of Jewish-Arab coexistence as he stood next to a veiled young Arab woman working on the assembly line across from an older woman with a black head covering who immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union in 1993.

Zooming in on Birnbaum and the two women, the camera crews and microphone-holding reporters overlooked another young Palestinian woman standing nearby, fitting plastic valves into a large metal tray. Nahida Fares, 28, graduated Nablus’s A-Najjah University in primary school education. She began working for Israeli companies two years ago, when she could find no work in her field in Ramallah, where she lives with her husband and infant child.

“There are no job opportunities in the West Bank,” Fares told The Times of Israel. “Even the jobs that do exist pay no more than NIS 1,500-2,000 ($430-570) a month.” Fares now earns triple those sums. Fares’s husband, a first lieutenant in the Palestinians’ prestigious Preventive Security Force, earns NIS 2,000 ($570) per month after 10 years of service.

According to the "unbiased" BBC

The "unbiased" BBC's Middle East correspondent, Kevin Connolly, pretending to write a news article, slants the issues at once against SodaStream and Israel, quoting selected sources such as Sarah Colborne, campaign director for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

Connolly editorializes - writes sans attribution- that:

"The boycott movement is important.

"Supporters of the Palestinians have hit on a tactic that might encourage ordinary consumers to start differentiating products from the factories and farms of Israel on the one hand and Israeli settlements on the other.

"Israel is worried - especially at the prospect of the movement gathering pace if peace talks with the Palestinians collapse."

Possibly what bother's Mr. Connolly is the fact that SodaStream no longer is a English firm. In two of his editorial's opening paragraphs, he opines that:

"The company - now under Israeli ownership - likes to emphasise its green credentials, trading on the idea that making your own cola at home in a re-usable bottle saves plastic bottles and therefore, ultimately, saves the planet.

The SodaStream has always exhibited a Dr Who-style capacity for self-reinvention - it started out as a machine for producing fresh soda water in the homes of the wealthy and well-connected in Edwardian England."

Sources

Kevin Connolly/BBC editorial:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-25966781

Judy Miltz/HaAretz article:
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.571986

Elhanan Miller/Times of Israel article:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/at-sodastream-palestinians-hope-their-bubble-wont-burst/?utm_source=Start-Up+Daily&utm_campaign=b736272ff2-2014_02_04_SUI2_4_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_fb879fad58-b736272ff2-54610173

Stand With Us YouTube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDdH_7GjW40