Picket of Brighton's Sodastream Shop Takes Zionists By Surprise

A Xmas Surprise for Sodastream

 

For the past year, Palestine Solidarity Campaign have been mounting a regular weekly picket, accompanied by 'pop' pickets outside the Sodastream shop in Brighton

Cobb's cry for help went unheeded - how touching

Not a shopper in sight

A group of far-Right Zionists, including EDL supporter Simon Cobbs, have attempted to disrupt and stop the picket - but to no good effect.  Their main chants when I'm there are 'traitor - presumably a loyal Jew is a racist Jew according to this 'logic'.

The campaign in Brighton has not only been successful in its own terms but it has sparked a world-wide boycott of Sodastream, a company based on confiscated land on the Mishor Adumim industrial estate between Jerusalem and Maaleh Adumim (an Israeli settlement).  Palestinians, of course work there (a favourite Zionist argument) just as they did in South Africa's gold and diamond mines.  Not out of choice but necessity.

Simon Cobbs, leader of the Zionist contingent, looking non too pleased

However what expense-paid journalists like Simon Keenan of the Argus appear not to have noticed is that anyone who joins a trade union is a ' trouble maker' and instantly fired.

I am pleased to say that during the entire period of our picket, from 5-6 pm, in freezing weather, not a single customer entered the shop and when I went back an hour later the same situation applied.  I'd lost count of people who, when taking our leaflets, said they had heard of our campaign.  Likewise the number of Jewish people who come up to me and say that the actions of Israel are no different from the traditional anti-Jewish racists.

Shop acts as a loss leader - most of the time it is empty

But as the founder of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl wrote in his Diaries (p.6)
‘In Paris ...I achieved a freer attitude towards anti-Semitism, which I now began to understand historically and to pardon. Above all I recognise the emptiness and futility of trying to ‘combat’ anti-Semitism.’

 Corporate Watch Investigation into Sodastream

Xmas picket of Sodastream

 Sodastream, a carbonated beverage manufacturer is based in the Mishor Adumim settlement industrial zone. Mishor Adumim is an industrial are attached to the residential settlement of Ma'ale Adumim, East of Jerusalem in the Israeli occupied West Bank.

Xmas picket at 'Eco' Stream

Israeli company Soda Club, which owns the Sodastream brandname, has opened a new store called Ecostream on Western Road in Brighton.

Sodastream, a carbonated beverage manufacturer is based in the Mishor Adumim settlement industrial zone. Mishor Adumim is an industrial area attached to the residential settlement of Ma'ale Adumim, East of Jerusalem in the Israeli occupied West Bank.

Corporate Watch contacted Steve Bannatyne, who has been employed by Sodastream to open the store in Brighton.

Bannatyne said that the store was a place where people could buy refillable bottles for Sodastream syrups and detergents and would be branching out into food products too. The store stocks a range of Sodastream products.

The eco-concept store, which is owned on a lease, is Sodastream's only store in the UK. The company chose Brighton because of the strong green movement in the city.

3 prize Zionist fools - man in centre is an admirer of Omar Barghouti - spokesperson for Boycott National Committee

Last month Corporate Watch spoke to a woman who had attended an interview to work at Ecostream but had decided to withdraw her application after she became aware that Sodastream profit from ?from the Israeli occupation and human rights abuses?.

Bannatyne said he had passed the concerns on to the company and they had responded but that he felt he was not qualified to comment on behalf of the business?

The expansion of Mishor Adumim settlement industrial zone, where the main Sodastream factory is based, is encroaching on the land of the Jahalin bedouin, who are being forcibly relocated to a reservation in Abu Dis, next to the Jerusalem Municipal rubbish dump.

Bannatyne told Corporate Watch that he had been taken on a short visit to Israel by Sodastream where he was taken to two of the company's factories. He was taken to the company's Ashkelon factory, inside 1948 Israel, where syrup is manufactured and to the Mishor factory which manufactures 'machinery'. He said he was 'pleasantly surprised' by the conditions at the factories and that he was told that 'the workers were paid more than in the neighbouring villages'.

However, Palestinians living in the villages around Mishor Adumim are prevented from building any permanent structure under Israeli military orders. Their tents and huts, and even a primary school at Khan-al-Ahmar, are subject to demolition by the army (more details see)

'Ecostream is not Green' appeals to people

These building restrictions prevent the establishment of any Palestinian businesses, meaning that local Palestinians are forced to work in the settlements. Palestinian agriculture is limited by the settlements monopoly on land and the restrictions placed on the grazing of cattle, often leading to the seizure of cattle by the army see).

Palestinians working for Sodastream in Mishor Adumim are working in the context of the occupation. In January 2012 activists from Stop Sodastream Italy made the following statement in response to claims by the company that its workers were well treated: ?the fact remains that, as subjects of an occupation regime, these workers do not enjoy civil rights (including the right of workers to organize) and are under constant threat of having their permits to work in the settlement revoked by the company at any moment.?

"Palestinian workers often have no choice but to work in the settlements, with high unemployment rates that are a direct result of the Israeli occupation. The 2011 United Nations Conference on Trade and Development report explicitly links the decline in Palestinian agricultural and industrial sectors and the dire humanitarian conditions with Israeli government policies, in particular the confiscation of land and natural resources, restrictions on movement of people and goods, and isolation from international markets. Only a colonial mindset could claim to provide jobs to the very same people whose land and freedom have been stolen."

The Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions urges a boycott of all Israeli companies until Israel complies with international humanitarian law, recognizes the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality, the rights of return of refugees and ends the siege of Gaza and the occupation of all lands occupied in 1967.

Sodastream products are sold in the UK at Robert Dyas, John Lewis, Argos, Comet, Lakeland and some Sainsbury and Asda stores.

For more information on Soda Club see  pages 96-102 and here
Sodastream’s reply fails to convince

Christian Zionists in support of Genocide & Expulsion

An interesting article on the support of fundamentalist Christian Zionists for Israeli settlements.  As has been documented on this blog before, no group in the USA, where most of these creatures are based, is more anti-Semitic and at the same time more pro-Zionist than the Christian Fundamentalists  (see American Jews Reject Zionism’s anti-Semitic Christian Friends).

This should not surprise anyone.  Historically Zionism was the offshoot of  messianic and evangelical Christianity - people like Lords Shaftesbury, Disraeli, Palmerstone as well as Napoleon and Ernest Laharanne, Napoleon III's Secretary and of course Arthur James Balfour.  The most vigorous opponents of Zionism were Jews, who saw Zionism as another (Jewish) version of anti-Semitism.  When Herzl, founder of Political Zionism, wanted to hold the First Zionist Congress, he wanted to hold it in Munich, but the local Jewish community and a petition of Jewish rabbis forced him to hold it in Basel, Switzerland.  Likewise the only member of the Lloyd George Cabinet to vote against the Balfour Declaration was its only Jewish member, Sir Edwin Montagu (though Lord Curzon was none too happy about it either).  People like George Elliot in Daniel Deronda romanticised it in a crude pastiche of cardboard characters of Jews.

If you wanted to get rid of the Jews in your society, what better place than to send them to than a  colony adjacent to the Suez Canal, the route to the Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire, India.

This was what was done in South Africa, where under the influence of ideologues such as Edward  Gibbon Wakefield 
 

Today the most devoted supporter of Zionism are the Christian Dispensationists who believe in the 'return' of the Jews to Palestine in order that they might then be subject to an almighty conflagration in order that the Elect might wing their way to heaven with the joys of Rapture.

Cross-post from Corporate Watch

Sign for Christian Friends of Israeli Communities in the illegal Israeli settlement Ma’ale Efrayim.

Charity’ and Ethnic Cleansing: Christian Friends of Israeli Communities

Posted on March 8, 2013 by Tom Anderson and Therezia Cooper

Corporate Watch has previously reported on the role that Zionist charities play in the support of illegal settlements and a recent research trip provided more evidence of this practice. On 21st January 2013 Corporate Watch researchers photographed a sign stating that Christian Friends of Israeli Communities (CFOIC) had donated a playground in Ma’ale Efrayim, an illegal settlement with a population of around 1400 in the occupied Jordan Valley.

Signs of expansion of the fields by the illegal settlement Maskiot in the Jordan Valley, 2013

Christian Friends of Israeli Communities is an ideologically Zionist charity which supports the settlements for religious reasons. Set up in 1995 in response to the Oslo Accords, it exclusively supports settler projects and actively encourages tourism to the settlements in the West Bank. Reading through the list of projects the charity is currently fundraising for, it becomes obvious that a lot of them are chosen for strategic reasons. For instance, there are a growing number of projects instigated in the Jordan Valley which is an area under threat of ethnic cleansing by the Israeli military. Whilst their projects in the valley might sound harmless enough – they include petting zoos, gyms and youth clubs – the aims are not. In the pitch for donations to the Argaman youth centre the charity states that “Argaman, like many of the Jordan Valley communities, is vital in securing Israel’s eastern border”. To encourage their potential donors to give generously to an exercise room in the settlement of Na’ama CFOIC writes “In Israel, physical fitness is a way of life, just as serving in the army and protecting the land is. Naama is seeking assistance to furnish an exercise room to help their young adults to stay physically fit and be ready for military service”. There are also appeals for donations to pay for security services to the settlements. The charity does not recognise the West Bank, which it refers to as “Judea and Samaria”.

Armed settlers from the illegal settlement of Maskiot setting up a tent on Palestinian land.

There are at least thirteen different projects currently being planned by CFOIC in the Jordan Valley. CFOIC is also fundraising for other settlements next to particularly threatened Palestinian communities including Kfar Adumim, the expansion of which is forcibly displacing the Jahalin Bedouin of Khan Al Ahmar, and Susiya settlement, which is threatening the existence of the Palestinian village of the same name in the South Hebron Hills.

Christian Friends of Israeli Communities donated olive field by Maskiot settlement in 2010.

Charities which support settlements have a very real impact on Palestinian communities on the ground. The first time Corporate Watch came across CFOIC was on a visit to the settlement of Maskiot in 2010. Maskiot was the first new settlement to be approved by the Israeli Government in the Jordan Valley for a decade, and most of the settlers moving in were ideological settlers who used to live in the Gush Katif settlement in Gaza. CFOIC had donated a field of olive trees to the settlement. Since 2010 the Bedouin communities in Al Maleh, next to Maskiot, have suffered constant harassment by the Maskiot settlers and faced numerous home demolitions and threats by the Israeli Occupation Forces as Israel are tightening their grip on the land.

Armed settlers from the illegal settlement of Maskiot setting up a tent on Palestinian land.

Visiting the area again in January this year, it was clear that Maskiot had expanded since our last visit, with the entry gate moved forward significantly and evidence of more fields being planted.



Corporate Watch will publish another article with more news about Christian Friends of Israeli Communities next week.