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Fellow Humans
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
Fellow humans
Fruit and vegetable exports to Europe are crucial to the Israeli economy, representing 80% of that country's total exports. The UK is its largest market, eating up a 60% share. Carmel Agrexco itself is 50% owned by the Israeli state, so a consumer boycott of agricultural produce exerts direct economic pressure where it matters.
Israel operates an entrenched system of racial Apartheid against its own non-Jewish inhabitants and has been illegally occupying Palestinian land in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights since 1967. It has sought to further annex these lands and has systematically transferred its own civilian population into these occupied territories in contravention of international law. Israel continues to build the illegal Apartheid wall, annexing vast swathes of Palestinian land in the West Bank and creating Palestinian ghettos, despite the ruling of the International Court of Justice that it is illegal.
I urge you to stop buying from:
ALL ISRAELI FRUIT AND VEG PRODUCERS,
all the brands the big campaign tells you about (incl Lloyds TSB, Coca Cola, Macdonalds, L'oreal, Nestle, and 100s more).
Here are some good sources where I found my info. I will not stop urging people to boycott Israel until there is peace for every Israeli and Palestinian child. The boycott is the ONLY WAY to stop this war and to stop the blood flowing on either side of Israel's legal and illegal borders.
----
Why I'm boycotting Israeli produce
Fruit and vegetable exports are crucial to the Israeli economy. A consumer boycott of agricultural produce exerts direct economic pressure where it matters
If you're not in the habit of checking the country of origin on fruit and vegetables to minimise food miles, you may not have noticed just how much Israeli produce is in our shops and supermarkets. At the moment, there are piles of new potatoes (though it's hard to see why anyone with a scrap of environmental awareness would buy these when our indigenous main crop spuds are still firm and abundant), and that's just for starters.
If you go out today and buy avocadoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, Medjoul dates, sharon fruit (persimmons), chillies, oranges, pomegranates, grapefruit or fresh herbs, it's extremely likely that they will be Israeli. Most of this produce carries country of origin labelling or is branded as Carmel, Bio-Top or Jaffa. In the herb category, there's room - intentional or otherwise - for confusion. Increasingly your dill, tarragon or basil may be labelled as 'West Bank'. This is not a Palestinian alternative to the Israeli option; it comes from Israeli settlements in Palestine's occupied territories.
Israel's agricultural exporting company, Carmel Agrexco, is one of the biggest suppliers of fresh produce to the UK. As the company puts it:
Israel's sunny climate enables Agrexco to tap the resources of its Carmel growers most of the annum. By lining up other complementary supply sources – such as fruit, vegetable and root crop growers located in countries in the Mediterranean basin, South America, and Africa – the Carmel label is available year-round
An expert in air-freighting with a base near Heathrow, Agrexco supplies the UK with everything from sweetcorn, rocket and radishes through to melons, strawberries and kumquats, so delivering the 'permanent global summertime' of horticultural produce that food retailers have educated British consumers to expect.
As a business, it's impressive, but I don't intend to buy any of it. For people aware of the recent horror that unfolded in Gaza and the emerging evidence of the scale of destruction, this cornucopia of fruit and vegetables represents a ready-made target for taking personal action in our daily lives to express disapproval at Israel's ongoing aggression against the Palestinian people.
We can use the same tactic against Israel that was so effective in showing up South Africa as the apartheid state it once was. The parallels with South Africa are striking. Writing in the Guardian, Naomi Klein recently reminded us of the words of Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, who said in 2007 that the segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid".
So what, exactly, is he talking about? While we have been munching our way through its avocadoes, Israel has demolished Palestinian homes, evicted their occupants and expropriated their land and water resources. It has illegally colonised productive Palestinian land with waves of settlers. A boycott of Israeli fruit and vegetables, as opposed to other sorts of boycott (academic, sporting), is particularly apt because horticulture has been a major plank of Israeli expansion. Medjoul dates in the Jordan Valley, for example, base their operations on confiscated Palestinian land, in contravention of international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention...
With intractable political conflicts, sometimes it's hard to see how individual action can make even the slightest difference. But fruit and vegetable exports to Europe are crucial to the Israeli economy, representing 80% of that country's total exports. The UK is its largest market, eating up a 60% share. Carmel Agrexco itself is 50% owned by the Israeli state, so a consumer boycott of agricultural produce exerts direct economic pressure where it matters.
By refusing to buy Israeli produce, ethically-minded consumers can be part of the wider Boycott Israeli Goods campaign (BIG) and add to the international condemnation of Israel's tactics in Palestine. The reasons for a boycott precede the most recent open conflict and are ever-more important. Even if the current shaky ceasefire holds, Gaza will still be an open prison and Palestine will still be a country whose food economy is actively sabotaged by its powerful neighbour. Just at the moment, many people don't have any appetite for Israeli produce. A boycott gives us something to do about it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/jan/23/israel-food-boycott-palestinians-gaza
----
One of the best ways not to do anything and vegetate at home while watching DVDs and eating junk food is to say to yourself “well, what difference can I make? I’m just one person and one person’s actions will not save the world”. It is through passive indifference that authoritarian regimes thrive around us. Tyrants and despots rely on the passivity of their subjects to gain time and ground to spread their poisonous tentacles, and in our idle sleep we forget that our comfort zones are being eaten away bit by bit, inch by inch, til the day comes when the stormtroopers are standing at our doorstep.
Now look at the successes we have had over the past few decades in terms of boycotts:
The environmentalist lobby – through threats of boycotts and consumer awareness campaigns – has forced companies to adopt greener modes of production and more ethical means of raw material procurement. (As in the case of fair trade coffee, etc.);
The anti-apartheid lobby has managed – again through boycotts – to compel communities and governments to isolate the apartheid regime of South Africa to the point where maintaining such a discriminatory regime was unsustainable in the long run; and managed to make them pariahs in the global diplomatic scene;
The ethical banking lobby – again through threat of boycotts – has managed to compel banks and financial houses in Europe to return stolen funds embezzled by Third World dictators; and has also managed to persuade banks to dis-invest from countries like South Africa.
Related to the liberals’ concern is the somewhat pathetic refrain that boycotts will also hurt local producers and local workers who may be working for these multinationals. We offer a three-pronged reply to this fallacious argument:
Firstly, it would be ridiculous to suggest that companies that invest in a colonial state like Israel actually care about the rights and dignity of their workers elsewhere. A company that has no issues or problems collaborating with imperialism and colonialism is a company whose directors have scant regard for human rights and dignity in the first place, including the rights and dignity of their workers.
Thirdly we need to remember that we are also compelled to act morally even in cases where moral action does not necessarily bring immediate positive results. We do not tell the truth simply to score points with our friends. We tell the truth because that is the ethical thing to do. Moral action entails responsibility and we need to remember that even if we are not directly positively responsible for the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, we are nonetheless negatively responsible by our inaction.
To fail to act, to fail to make a stand now in the face of such overwhelming evidence, is to commit the mistake of negative moral responsibility via neglect. It would be akin to letting a blind man cross a street while a car was coming, and not warning the blind man before he is struck down. In such a case we are not responsible for running down the man, but we are responsible for not trying to warn him. The guilt remains with us nonetheless.
http://syarafuddinsulaiman.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/gaza-and-the-liberal-conscience-the-power-of-boycotts/
----
Thank you in advance to all those who will help, and who will make our world better for everyone, not in 10 years, or 1000, but today, IN OUR TIMES.
Pax vobiscum
Fruit and vegetable exports to Europe are crucial to the Israeli economy, representing 80% of that country's total exports. The UK is its largest market, eating up a 60% share. Carmel Agrexco itself is 50% owned by the Israeli state, so a consumer boycott of agricultural produce exerts direct economic pressure where it matters.
Israel operates an entrenched system of racial Apartheid against its own non-Jewish inhabitants and has been illegally occupying Palestinian land in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights since 1967. It has sought to further annex these lands and has systematically transferred its own civilian population into these occupied territories in contravention of international law. Israel continues to build the illegal Apartheid wall, annexing vast swathes of Palestinian land in the West Bank and creating Palestinian ghettos, despite the ruling of the International Court of Justice that it is illegal.
I urge you to stop buying from:
ALL ISRAELI FRUIT AND VEG PRODUCERS,
all the brands the big campaign tells you about (incl Lloyds TSB, Coca Cola, Macdonalds, L'oreal, Nestle, and 100s more).
Here are some good sources where I found my info. I will not stop urging people to boycott Israel until there is peace for every Israeli and Palestinian child. The boycott is the ONLY WAY to stop this war and to stop the blood flowing on either side of Israel's legal and illegal borders.
----
Why I'm boycotting Israeli produce
Fruit and vegetable exports are crucial to the Israeli economy. A consumer boycott of agricultural produce exerts direct economic pressure where it matters
If you're not in the habit of checking the country of origin on fruit and vegetables to minimise food miles, you may not have noticed just how much Israeli produce is in our shops and supermarkets. At the moment, there are piles of new potatoes (though it's hard to see why anyone with a scrap of environmental awareness would buy these when our indigenous main crop spuds are still firm and abundant), and that's just for starters.
If you go out today and buy avocadoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, Medjoul dates, sharon fruit (persimmons), chillies, oranges, pomegranates, grapefruit or fresh herbs, it's extremely likely that they will be Israeli. Most of this produce carries country of origin labelling or is branded as Carmel, Bio-Top or Jaffa. In the herb category, there's room - intentional or otherwise - for confusion. Increasingly your dill, tarragon or basil may be labelled as 'West Bank'. This is not a Palestinian alternative to the Israeli option; it comes from Israeli settlements in Palestine's occupied territories.
Israel's agricultural exporting company, Carmel Agrexco, is one of the biggest suppliers of fresh produce to the UK. As the company puts it:
Israel's sunny climate enables Agrexco to tap the resources of its Carmel growers most of the annum. By lining up other complementary supply sources – such as fruit, vegetable and root crop growers located in countries in the Mediterranean basin, South America, and Africa – the Carmel label is available year-round
An expert in air-freighting with a base near Heathrow, Agrexco supplies the UK with everything from sweetcorn, rocket and radishes through to melons, strawberries and kumquats, so delivering the 'permanent global summertime' of horticultural produce that food retailers have educated British consumers to expect.
As a business, it's impressive, but I don't intend to buy any of it. For people aware of the recent horror that unfolded in Gaza and the emerging evidence of the scale of destruction, this cornucopia of fruit and vegetables represents a ready-made target for taking personal action in our daily lives to express disapproval at Israel's ongoing aggression against the Palestinian people.
We can use the same tactic against Israel that was so effective in showing up South Africa as the apartheid state it once was. The parallels with South Africa are striking. Writing in the Guardian, Naomi Klein recently reminded us of the words of Ronnie Kasrils, a prominent South African politician, who said in 2007 that the segregation he saw in the West Bank and Gaza was "infinitely worse than apartheid".
So what, exactly, is he talking about? While we have been munching our way through its avocadoes, Israel has demolished Palestinian homes, evicted their occupants and expropriated their land and water resources. It has illegally colonised productive Palestinian land with waves of settlers. A boycott of Israeli fruit and vegetables, as opposed to other sorts of boycott (academic, sporting), is particularly apt because horticulture has been a major plank of Israeli expansion. Medjoul dates in the Jordan Valley, for example, base their operations on confiscated Palestinian land, in contravention of international law and the Fourth Geneva Convention...
With intractable political conflicts, sometimes it's hard to see how individual action can make even the slightest difference. But fruit and vegetable exports to Europe are crucial to the Israeli economy, representing 80% of that country's total exports. The UK is its largest market, eating up a 60% share. Carmel Agrexco itself is 50% owned by the Israeli state, so a consumer boycott of agricultural produce exerts direct economic pressure where it matters.
By refusing to buy Israeli produce, ethically-minded consumers can be part of the wider Boycott Israeli Goods campaign (BIG) and add to the international condemnation of Israel's tactics in Palestine. The reasons for a boycott precede the most recent open conflict and are ever-more important. Even if the current shaky ceasefire holds, Gaza will still be an open prison and Palestine will still be a country whose food economy is actively sabotaged by its powerful neighbour. Just at the moment, many people don't have any appetite for Israeli produce. A boycott gives us something to do about it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2009/jan/23/israel-food-boycott-palestinians-gaza
----
One of the best ways not to do anything and vegetate at home while watching DVDs and eating junk food is to say to yourself “well, what difference can I make? I’m just one person and one person’s actions will not save the world”. It is through passive indifference that authoritarian regimes thrive around us. Tyrants and despots rely on the passivity of their subjects to gain time and ground to spread their poisonous tentacles, and in our idle sleep we forget that our comfort zones are being eaten away bit by bit, inch by inch, til the day comes when the stormtroopers are standing at our doorstep.
Now look at the successes we have had over the past few decades in terms of boycotts:
The environmentalist lobby – through threats of boycotts and consumer awareness campaigns – has forced companies to adopt greener modes of production and more ethical means of raw material procurement. (As in the case of fair trade coffee, etc.);
The anti-apartheid lobby has managed – again through boycotts – to compel communities and governments to isolate the apartheid regime of South Africa to the point where maintaining such a discriminatory regime was unsustainable in the long run; and managed to make them pariahs in the global diplomatic scene;
The ethical banking lobby – again through threat of boycotts – has managed to compel banks and financial houses in Europe to return stolen funds embezzled by Third World dictators; and has also managed to persuade banks to dis-invest from countries like South Africa.
Related to the liberals’ concern is the somewhat pathetic refrain that boycotts will also hurt local producers and local workers who may be working for these multinationals. We offer a three-pronged reply to this fallacious argument:
Firstly, it would be ridiculous to suggest that companies that invest in a colonial state like Israel actually care about the rights and dignity of their workers elsewhere. A company that has no issues or problems collaborating with imperialism and colonialism is a company whose directors have scant regard for human rights and dignity in the first place, including the rights and dignity of their workers.
Thirdly we need to remember that we are also compelled to act morally even in cases where moral action does not necessarily bring immediate positive results. We do not tell the truth simply to score points with our friends. We tell the truth because that is the ethical thing to do. Moral action entails responsibility and we need to remember that even if we are not directly positively responsible for the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, we are nonetheless negatively responsible by our inaction.
To fail to act, to fail to make a stand now in the face of such overwhelming evidence, is to commit the mistake of negative moral responsibility via neglect. It would be akin to letting a blind man cross a street while a car was coming, and not warning the blind man before he is struck down. In such a case we are not responsible for running down the man, but we are responsible for not trying to warn him. The guilt remains with us nonetheless.
http://syarafuddinsulaiman.wordpress.com/2009/01/16/gaza-and-the-liberal-conscience-the-power-of-boycotts/
----
Thank you in advance to all those who will help, and who will make our world better for everyone, not in 10 years, or 1000, but today, IN OUR TIMES.
Pax vobiscum
0
Comments
Some of us here support Israel, some of us don't, most of us can probable recognise that boycotting Israeli produce isn't going to help. A tactic like that might work with a virtually bankrupt 3rd world nation, but not a country like Israel.
Have to say though, agreed that it can't make that much difference, the problem is Israel is just too popular. It does get a lot of criticism, but that's not across the board. Walk into a room with 10 people, 4 will say Israel are horrid, 4 will say they are fantastic and Hamas 'got what was coming to them', and the other 2 wont give a crap.
This is different from situations in SA where the way it was handled, 7 out of those 10 would have condemned SA, 1 would have condoned and the other 2 wouldn't have given a crap. Without wanting to come across as judgemental, Israel has die-hard supporters that in a lot of circumstances are unable to see any wrong in what it's doing. These same supporters are voters around the world, particularly in the United States and the UK, so I don't see how a political party can break away from Israel without sacrificing themselves at the next election.
I'm not going to pretend I know loads about this issue... but surely there are some Palestinian workers working on these farms....?
Quite right. SA was self-sufficient in almost everything and was also the leading supplier of many critical irons and minerals required by the rest of the world. If anything, it strengthened South Africa's hand.
The end of the apartheid regime was more due to the government realsing that it was on the brink of a civil war and they would get no support from anyone else in the world, they would get a better deal under a negotiated settlement, they suffered almost complete political/social/sporting isolation, etc
If a comparison is to be drawn between SA and Israel, it ought to be that Israel should recognise by the South African model that a negotiated settlement is the only way it will survive.
If we stop buying fruit and veg from a certain country, doesn't that just hurt the farmer ? Is the Israeli, or whoever, government that concerned that we don't buy their artichokes ?
There's not a cat in hell's chance I would endorse any campaign to try and boycott Israel. It's time for more people to support this nation in its fight for its own existence - myself included. I often wonder what drives anti-Israel feeling and I've come to the conclusion that some of it is simply anti-Semitism - something which simply isn't challenged often enough.
Just to annoy all those sanctimonious people who are bitching about Israel, I'm going to urge everyone to buy MORE Israeli goods. I will continue to buy my Coca Cola, I will continue to eat cererals from Nestle. Although I won't endorse the suggestion of going to McDonalds, not that they need anyone to - they're doing extremely well at the moment.
If they want to make a difference then Hamas really needs to keep to the ceasefire. Since the "war" ended they've continued shooting rockets into Israel.
They might not have hurt many people, but the intent is there.
And of course it'll be Israel's fault when it retaliates again.