For the past few years my wife and I, always preferring to buy Israeli made-goods whether we are in Israel or the USA, carefully scrutinized labels on Israeli products to see where they were made. Living half of each year in Tel Aviv, it seemed almost normative to not purchase goods made in the West Bank. We have many friends who made aliyah decades ago, passionate Zionists all, who have boycotted goods from Judea and Samaria for a long time (Click here for one example). They are anguished over what the occupation has done to Israeli democracy and the rule of law, and are frightened for the future.
Imagine then our surprise over the controversy stirred up by Peter Beinart’s op-ed column in yesterday’s New York Times calling for a targeted boycott of West Bank products in order to save Israel….
To read the rest of this post, go to http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/to-boycott-or-not-to-boycott-the-furor-over-peter-beinarts-proposal/
Seven Months in Tel Aviv 
Mar 21, 2012 @ 10:00:06
The arguments over the propriety of boycotting the products of West Bank settlements have been inundating these last 24 hours, jump-started by Peter Beinart’s OpEd piece in The New York Times of March 19th. There, Beinart advocated a tough boycott, one that would not only place purchase of settlement products beyond the pale but that would also lobby to exclude such goods from America’s free trade deal with Israel and push to end IRS policies that allow Americans to make tax-deductible gifts to settler charities.
Beinart has been attacked from both the right and the left, and many of the arguments on both sides have actually been thoughtful. I find myself in a bit of a quandary: I believe the boycott of products is essentially symbolic, quite unlikely to achieve its intended goal, yet I am pleased to have an opportunity to register – even symbolically – my opposition to Israel’s settlement project. Still, spending energy on a project so very unlikely to generate widespread support?
The news of the day resolves the quandary: “Settlers in the West Bank have seized control of dozens of springs in the past few years, and often use violence and intimidation to prevent Palestinians’ access to them, according to a UN agency report published yesterday. The report was commissioned by OCHA, the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territories. According to data compiled by Dror Etkes, former head of the Peace Now settlement-tracking project, settlers have been acting systematically to control some 56 springs, 30 of which have been completely taken over. Most of the springs are in the area of the Mateh Binyamin Regional Council; the council for its part denies that Palestinians are not being allowed to use the water.”
As it happens, I know Dror Etkes and have absolute confidence in his always painstaking research. His report adds one more heartbreak to a heart already broken by outrageous settler behavior so many times over the last four decades.
Accordingly, I am left with no choice but to endorse the boycott. Attention must, after all, be paid, and “yes, but” is simply not an option. I am sorry this has become a “which side are you on” issue, but for that I blame those who have, evidently with impunity, seized property that does not belong to them.