Pro-Israel groups are urging supporters to buy Israeli goods on March 30 to counter a global anti-Israel boycott called for that day.
Montreal\’s city council has condemned the boycott campaign against a local shoe store that sells footwear made in Israel. A council motion deploring the campaign, proposed and supported by Mayor Gerard Tremblay, passed Tuesday by a vote of 38 to 16.
Should Jewish communal funds find their way into the hands of groups that condone or actively engage in the boycott of Israel? No, you say, of course not. Why should Jews finance people or groups who want to punish Israel? But it’s not so simple.
Jewish groups are satisfied that a decision by Canada\’s best-known department store chain to drop an Israeli beauty line is unrelated to boycott calls. A joint statement Thursday by The Bay stores, UJA Federation of Greater Toronto and the Canada Israel Committee said The Bay was dropping AHAVA beauty products \”primarily because of sales results which had been declining for several years.\” The announcement came days after a pro-Palestinian coalition, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, launched a boycott campaign against The Bay for selling the popular AHAVA line of Dead Sea beauty products.
Calls for a boycott of Israeli-made beauty products in Canada again have kick-started Jewish counter efforts. Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, a pro-Palestinian coalition, has launched a boycott campaign against stores selling the popular Ahava line of Dead Sea beauty products. On its website, the coalition charges that Ahava \”is economically linked to Israel\’s occupation of the Palestinian territories,\” and that almost 45 percent of the company is owned by \”two illegal Israeli colonies\” near the Dead Sea.
What a wonderful idea. Let us counteract a boycott by engaging in a boycott of our own; let us boycott the boycotters who in turn can retaliate by boycotting the boycotters of the boycott.
The entire Jewish community should applaud the recently announced plan by The Jewish Federations of North America, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and several major Jewish federations to invest millions of dollars over the next few years to fight the delegitimization and demonization of Israel. These groups understand that if academic and cultural boycotts are legitimate when aimed at Jews in the West Bank today, they will soon become legitimate when aimed at Jews in Tel Aviv tomorrow; and, you can be sure that after that, the boycotters will set their sites on Jews in New York, Los Angeles, Peoria … and everywhere else that Jews live.
A local council in Australia that has a sister-city relationship with Bethlehem voted to join the international boycott of Israel. The Marrickville Council in inner Sydney voted 10-2 on Dec. 14 to support a ban on any government, academic, trade, sporting or cultural ties with Israel. The council, which is dominated by members of the Green and Labor parties, first raised the ire of the Jewish community with its 2007 vote to adopt the sister-city relationship with Bethlehem. The action prompted the government to warn lawmakers that they risked breaking the law if they met with Hamas members on the Bethlehem council.
Last April, Keri Copans, Hillel\’s campus director at the University of California, San Diego, learned that a measure was about to come before her student government asking the university to divest from companies that do business with \”occupying\” powers.
Amanda Boris is nervous about what she’ll face when classes resume at the University of Wisconsin later this month.
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.