Thursday, October 30, 2014

BDS War on SodaStream Just Killed Muslim Jobs and Created Israeli Jobs - Daniel Greenfield



by Daniel Greenfield


SodaStream_2808736b

Mission accomplished?
SodaStream International Ltd. will close a factory in a West Bank settlement that had prompted calls by pro-Palestinian activists for consumers to boycott the Israeli company’s soda machines.
SodaStream Chief Executive Officer Daniel Birnbaum defended his company to journalists in February at a tour of the plant, which as of this year employed 500 Palestinians, 450 Israeli Arabs and 350 Israeli Jews.
Production will be relocated to a facility in the southern town of Lehavim, Hurwitz said. SodaStream is working with the Israeli government to secure work permits for the Palestinian employees, she said.
File that under “good luck”.

Work permits or no work permits, Muslim terrorism is the great disruptor and an international company can’t be tied to a workforce whose travel will be unpredictably disrupted.

While the media is giving BDS credit for it, SodaStream’s stock fall didn’t have anything to do with BDS, it did have to do with overestimating the market for home soda by assuming it would follow the Keurig model. That plan fell apart and SodaStream is pushing into flavored water, also debatable, and trying to ally with Pepsi.

The Lehavim plant was already part of the plan. So this has less to do with BDS and more to do with a changing business model and the assumption that there isn’t going to be peace any time soon so there’s also no sense in a long term commitment. Israel has been pushing companies to relocate to the Negev and offering generous tax incentives so that BDS is taking credit for Israeli government policy.

But let’s take the BDSers at their word and assume that it’s all due to them. What exactly did they accomplish by putting a bunch of the people they claim to care about out of work?


Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/bds-war-on-sodastream-just-killed-muslim-jobs-and-created-israeli-jobs/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

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