The Israeli Apartheid week is being mentioned nowadays in hundreds of universities around the world for the 12th time. For 12 years already this movement has been spreading lies, while continuously harming those they pretend to protect. And for 12 years, people in over 200 cities worldwide have been exposed to bigotry, deception, and shallowness.
At first, it was not easy seeing the truth beyond the fog screen of lies. BDS activists would protest on the streets and online, calling businesses and universities to boycott the Israeli apartheid regime that constantly violates the basic human rights of the Palestinian people. They would show pictures and videos and present facts, and quickly succeeded in convincing the public of their twisted version of reality.
In recent years, however, it had become difficult not to notice the winds of change on social media, and on campus, as the counter-voice rises, sharing the true complexity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and crumbles every lie to little shreds of truth. Somehow, however, the hatred seems to grow, and the BDS movement still holds their successful annual Israeli Apartheid Week Festival. This, sadly for us all, shows that it's not the “activists'” ability to lie that keeps this movement so successful, but the public's desire to find a common enemy.
Two years ago, it seemed as if it was the beginning of the end for the BDS movement, and their Israeli Apartheid week. It was then when Scarlett Johansson “>even anti-Semites. As people who don't seek “Justice for Palestine,” but the annihilation of Israel.
This mission, to expose the truth, reached its peak recently, days before the first “Israeli Apartheid Week” event of the year took place: the BDS movement declared a “victory” when the factory of the Israeli company SodaStram, which is located in the West Bank and employs both Israelis and Palestinians, had to let go its Palestinian employees.
This plant of the Israeli carbonated beverage company was employing 1,300 workers, 350 of them were Israeli Jews, 450 were Israeli Arabs, and 500 were West Bank Palestinians. According to a report by the Times of Israel, the pay and benefits were identical for workers in comparable jobs, irrespective of their citizenship and ethnicity. This factory is truly an example of what the BDS claims to strife for – coexistence between Israeli Jews and Palestinian, and equal rights for all.
Following a hate campaign led by the BDS movement, SodaStream had to shut down the factory last October, and now, it has reluctantly announced on February 29th that it was laying off its Palestinian workers, having failed to secure permits from the Israeli government for them to work at its new factory in the southern Israeli Bedouin town of Rahat.
This is a straight-forward example of the true intentions of the BDS movement – showing how they're so eager to hurt Israel, that they don't really care about the people they pretend to fight for. However, as hateful, misleading displays of the “Israeli Apartheid Regime” are being installed around the western world, mentioning the 12th Israeli Apartheid Week and continuing to gain support.
In spite of relentless and successful efforts to expose them for who they are, the BDS movement is here to stay, so it seems. They are louder than the ones who expose their true agenda, and they continue to reach the ideal target audience- the “unaware public.” This is a group of people, the majority of the world’s population, actually, who is politically uninvolved with the conflicted Middle East, and does not find particular interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since they are unaware of the truth, and justifiably have no time to sit, read and fully understand the complicated reality here in Israel, their entire knowledge is based on what they hear from others.
This makes this “battle over the truth” a battle of “who shouts the loudest,” where the winner gets to define the reality we live in. After all, the truth here is what the majority of the world believes it to be, and if the majority, aka “the unaware public” believes Israel is an Apartheid state, this is what Israel becomes in the eyes of the world.
This means that our successful efforts to expose the truth must become louder. We can no longer settle for smiling to ourselves upon our success, but share it, talk about it, and scream it. We must become the louder voice of this battle, and scream at the top of our lungs, until we become louder than those who try to re-write reality.