Editorial: Spread the love

Editorial

Issueof July 24, 2009 / 3 Av 5769

Like many cosmetics companies, the public face of Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories is one of environmental consciousness, all natural, animal-safe and — is tree-huggy a word? You get the picture.

But the company has a dirty little secret — at least if you’re inclined to believe the Dead Sea mud being flung by a woman's “peace” group called CODEPINK. It has launched the “Stolen Beauty” boycott campaign against Ahava, holding protests in New York and Israel and even disrupting the company's booth at an international trade show in Las Vegas on Monday.

The group claims that Ahava, based in Mitzpe Shalom, near the Dead Sea, is guilty of “shady exploitation of West Bank resources,” “violates international human rights' laws and makes its profit on dirty products,” and funds “illegal Israeli settlements.” The group says it sent ‘fact-finders’ to Ahava headquarters recently and what they found “made their skin crawl”: Ahava “products produced on site in the Occupied West Bank are labeled of 'Israeli Origin' even though, according to international law … the West Bank cannot be considered to be part of the State of Israel.”

To list the myriad ways in which the activists of CODEPINK are ill informed and misinformed would take more space than we have on this page.        Rather, let's see how some other recent boycotts of Israeli products turned out.

On April 13 in this space we ran an account of a plan to encourage Passover wine shoppers in Vancouver to avoid Israeli brands:

“They must have not known that many Israeli wines are really good. And they must have not known that many, if not most, Jews are well aware that comparisons between Israel and the South African apartheid state of the 80's are specious and nonsensical. Hundreds of counter-protesters showed up and, guess what? They cleaned out the supply of Israeli vintages in several shops targeted by protesters, purchasing several thousand bottles.”

Last month a boycott attempt failed to convince Trader Joe’s to remove Israeli products from its stores; last week a film festival in Melbourne rejected threats and pressure to exclude Israeli films.

What can we do? Go buy some Dead Sea products and make sure this latest boycott is dead on arrival.

Some personal and personnel notes about the newspaper:

We are sorry to say goodbye to our superb assistant editor, Yaffi Spodek. She is off to Columbia Graduate School of Journalism where, no doubt, she will excel. Yaffi quietly did an excellent job during a year at The Jewish Star; she will be missed and we wish her well.

The Jewish Star welcomes intrepid reporter Michael Orbach indoors to his new job as assistant editor. As a freelance reporter for the paper Michael broke a number of interesting and valuable stories. Expect this to continue as he becomes more involved with the week to week process of editing and publishing the paper.