SodaStream, Palestine, & Benefitting In the Context Of Oppression

February 5, 2014

The recent controversy over Scarlett Johansson’s relationship with SodaStream has raised a classic historical conundrum: how do you react when an oppressed populace benefits from the acts of the oppressor?

Ari Kohen points to a recent article from USA Today in which Palestinian workers who work at the SodaStream factory are just glad to have jobs. These workers would suffer if the factory were to close due to pressure from the BDS movement:

On a visit to the factory, USA TODAY found that the [BDS] movement’s allegations were not on the minds of many of the plant’s 1,300 workers, of which 500 are Palestinian and 450 are Arab Israelis and 350 Jewish Israelis.
Israeli Arab Zafid Abu Aballah, 28, has been a machine operator at the factory for four years.
“I have an Israeli passport, if the firm closed I could find another job, but Palestinians would not be able to, there are no jobs for Palestinians in the West Bank.
"This is political, just political but the people here just want to work and live, they don’t have an interest in the politics between Palestine and Israel.”

Similar articles have been written at The Christian Science Monitor and The Telegraph. But those articles also point to a more complicated picture:

[L]awyers and labor activists say the picture is not that clear. While Palestinians earn roughly twice as much working at Israeli businesses in the West Bank, they lack labor rights and undermine Palestinian national aspirations. But many have little option; the Palestinian Authority has failed to leverage billions of dollars of aid to create more job opportunities.
“There has been little effort, whether on the part of the Palestinian Authority (PA) or the international community, to shut down Israeli factories and provide Palestinians with humane, dignified work,” says Diana Buttu, an international human rights lawyer and former adviser to the Palestinian negotiations team.

And not every Palestinian worker who works at SodaStream is quite so happy:

One of the workers waiting for the SodaStream bus this morning says he hates the fact that he’s working in an Israeli settlement, and lies to people when they inquire about his work.
“I’m ashamed I’m working there,” he says. “I feel this is our land, there should be no [Israeli] factory on this land.”
He feels like a “slave,” working 12 hours a day assembling parts – drilling in 12,000 screws a day, he adds.

Palestinian workers who benefit from the SodaStream factory are facing an ethically complicated situation that has repeated itself throughout history: one in which an occupying nation improves the lives of the citizens living in the occupied territory. The two most prominent examples would be The Roman Empire building infrastructure improvements in conquered nations, and the British Empire’s efforts to “civilize” India. There is no doubt that the lives of a substantial number of citizens who lived in these nations were improved to some degree when the occupying sovereign brought the resources of their home country to bear.

But in none of the cases did the benefits gained by occupied citizens create anything resembling a just relationship. For people opposed to ongoing injustices in the cases above, the question always remained: what is the most effective form of activism for a person who wants to see things change?

The BDS movement, despite its flaws, has been one of the only (if not the only) non-violent political movement that has caused Israeli authorities to blink over their policies in the Occupied Territories. Decades of efforts to negotiate peace through official channels have failed, and attempts to shame the government into action only result in retrenchment, exemplifed by the fact that the Israeli Government continues to ignore calls to halt settlement expansion despite repeated criticism from multiple quarters. The electoral process has also failed Palestinians, both in israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Given these realities, I agree with Larry Derfner when he writes that the desperation of Palestinian workers should not be used to defeat the controversy surrounding SodaStream:

To understate things, it is rather cynical using those Palestinian workers as a weapon against the boycott and, by extension, on behalf of the settlements and occupation. Cynical because those Palestinians don’t support the settlements or occupation in the slightest. Some put the issue out of their minds, some are reluctant to talk about it out loud, but most of them, if the boss isn’t looking, will tell you that of course they’re against the settlements and Israeli rule, but they have to feed their families.

The reason why Palestinian workers are so attached to the SodaStream factory is because the Israeli Government has ensured that it’s the only game in town for workers who live nearby. As Zafid Abu Aballah noted in the USA Today article above:

“I have an Israeli passport, if the firm closed I could find another job, but Palestinians would not be able to, there are no jobs for Palestinians in the West Bank.

It should come as no surprise that Palestinians without Israeli citizenship are essentially at the mercy of Israeli employers in the Occupied Territories. The Israeli Government has ensured that Palestinians are financially dependent on Israeli businesses by isolating the former economically, and by destroying the business capital, educational opportunities, real property, and natural resources of Palestinians. Going back to the CSM article:

Per capita GDP in Israel is more than 10 times that of Palestinians, while Palestinian unemployment (23 percent) is more than triple the Israeli rate (7 percent), according to figures provided to the Monitor by the Manufacturers Association of Israel.
That has prompted about 69,000 Palestinian workers – 10 percent of the Palestinian labor force – to work in the Israeli economy, where those who manage to secure a permit or risk working illegally earn an average daily wage of 164 shekels ($47), compared to 84 shekels ($24) in the PA economy.

So even though SodaStream may be providing good jobs to Palestinian workers, the fact is that those jobs exist in the context of an unjust relationship. As Noam Sheizaf noted a couple days ago, it is a problem "when one party is completely dependent on the other’s good will." As Elesheva Goldberg, a writer in Israel notes, “If their other option is to go and pluck chickens, what does that say about the space they’re living in, the barriers they’re facing?”

So where does that leave us on BDS? Here again, I agree with Larry Derfner:

I wish there were a way of ending the theft of the Palestinians’ land, and their freedom, and their pride by means other than the boycott. I have no desire to take away anybody’s job, Palestinian or Jew. But the boycott is working where elections, demonstrations, words, Palestinian non-violence and Obama all failed. If somebody can show me a way to bring down the occupation that doesn’t cost anyone his job – and that isn’t a proven failure – I will gladly support it. But no one has yet. So until then, I will see the boycott not as something to rejoice over, but as the lesser of two evils, the greater one being the humiliation Israel imposes on the Palestinians, even those who work at SodaStream.

3:15pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZMMjnx16XBvA0

(Notes: 32)