I
approached the current argument about whether to buy a 2 cents plain* maker
from SodaStream pretty much decided against doing so, though I consume a fair
amount of double bubble h20. But I am opposed to Israeli settlements on the west
bank, and always have been. It seemed to me SodaStream had cashed in on the land
grab powered by religious fanaticism, noxious nationalism and just plan greed.
After
heeding arguments for and against SodaStream I moved from anti to unsure. Heeding
further pushed me all across the way to pro-SodaStream. It's not that there
aren't good arguments against West Bank bubbly; it's just that many of them are
more specious than arguments for the product.
Yes,
the factory in Maale Adumim was built as part of the illegal, as per
international law, and immoral seizure of West Bank land, with tax inducements by
the Israeli government to SodaStream's founder. Of this there can be no doubt. Nor
should it be forgotten. But Maale Adumim is where one of SodaStream's 13 facilities,
the one under dispute, now sits, and where some 500 Palestinian workers are not
shy about saying they are glad to be employed, availing themselves of wages and
working conditions hard to come by elsewhere.
Those
who call for the SodaStream boycott either exaggerate or just plain lie about
worker discontents. For many of them, Israel can do no good. Or if it does good
the point is only to make propaganda. These, so far as I can tell, are key tenets
of the Boycott Divest Sanction movement aimed at all things Israeli. To get
into a full discussion of BDS here would take us far afield, so back to
SodaStream.
It's
true, as boycotters stress, that workers do not have a union and that unions
are good things for workers to have. But many workers, particularly in the
Third World, don't have unions or have unions that don't deserve the name, and
it's true that all too many workers in the U.S. lack for union representation, as
well, which does not usually generate calls for boycott. And the workers at SodaStream,
un-unionized as they may be, are nevertheless remunerated by management up to
the level won by workers within Israel itself.
To
summarize: it seems to me, after all my heeding, considering, hesitation and
indecision, that the boycott SodaStream movement doesn't much care that
SodaStream benefits workers (or seeks to deny the fact that it does) as much as
it bemoans the insult that SodaStream does to their idea of a future Palestine.
What I have a truly hard time understanding is why more energy hasn't been put
into thinking of how a Palestinian state and a concern like SodaStream might do
very well together, why such a prospect is treated as oxymoronic.
When
I consider how nicely SodaStream and a Palestinian state might fit together, here's
what begins to worry me: one of the Palestinian factions who have not renounced
terrorism will blow the factory up. Unless, of course, one of the Israeli
settler groups, loathing rapprochement just as fiercely, beats them to the
punch.
Of
course, this is paranoid. Nothing like this ever happens to potentially positive
outcomes in the Middle-East.
* Old
name (& price), dating from the redaction of the Brooklyn Talmud circa 1900,
for a glass of seltzer.
** Though
I've always liked Scarlett Johansson, even before knowing she was half-Jewish, her
pitch for SodaStream during the Stuporbowel, from which the best part —"Sorry
Coke and Pepsi" — had been excised, has nothing to do with it.
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