(WASHINGTON DC 05/29/2015) -- The American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), a national education and advocacy organization, has launched its fourth annual Israeli Occupation Date boycott in time for Ramadan, which starts in mid-June.
The campaign, which is an answer to the 2005 Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions, is geared toward American Muslims, one of the largest consumer groups of Israeli dates in the United States. Instead of buying dates grown in Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land, AMP encourages people to “buy American,” and offers links to date farms in the Bard Valley in California.
Date brands to boycott are Jordan River, Jordan River Bio-Tops, King Solomon and any dates bearing the logos from distributors Hadiklaim or Mehadrin.
“Sometimes consumers think they’re buying from Palestinian when they see brands like Jordan River,” said Osama Abuirshaid, policy analyst and director of AMP’s Washington DC office. “Our goal is to educate and raise awareness about how settlements detrimentally impact Palestinians and to encourage people to embrace BDS, a tool to force Israel to comply with international law.”
Israel is the world’s largest exporter of the Medjool date variety; and imports into the United States were valued at about $51 million in 2011, according to the USDA. Most of these date farms are located in the Jordan Valley and the Dead Sea area, both now under Israeli occupation. Because the occupation has decimated the Palestinian economy, many Palestinians are forced to work on these settlement farms under harsh conditions, for substandard pay and with no job security.
In a process called “distributing monkeys,” Israeli contractors often place Palestinian workers, even children as young as 10, on the tops of 40-foot-high date palms and then leave them there for an entire nine-hour shift. Workers hang on with one arm and pick dates with the other. They even eat their lunches this way, according to a 2006 investigation by Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz. The article, “Dates of Infamy” exposes labor violations and human rights abuses. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics has said that nearly 7,000 Palestinian children, ages 5-7 years old, worked in settlements in 2008.
"As soon as I climb up the tree, the only thing I think about is how to get down from it," the Haaretz article quotes a worker from Jiftlik. "I don't think about anything other than how not to fall out of the tree and how to manage to complete the quota. I know that at any moment I can fall and die …”
“When American Muslims buy dates from Israeli settlements, they are unsuspectingly supporting these terrible conditions as well as the settlement industry as a whole, which in turn supports the occupation,” Abuirshaid said. “We’re hoping to create critical mass and to make a dent in Israeli date imports into this country.”
The global BDS movement is making an impact. While there are no hard and fast statistics yet about the overall economic impact, in 2013, Israeli settlement farmers lost an estimated $29 million in revenue, a 14 percent decline, due mainly to European countries’ boycott of agricultural produce from settlements, according to the Christian Science Monitor. In 2010, the Reut Institute, an Israeli policy think tank that informs policy, declared BDS as an “existential threat” to Israel. Just three years later, the Israeli government called BDS a “strategic threat” to the occupation. The prime minister assigned the Ministry of Strategic Affairs the task of slowing down or stopping BDS after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs failed to do so, said a 2014 report, “Impact of the BDS Movement on Israel: The Economic Dimension,” by BDS co-founder Omar Barghouti and Birzeit University Professor Samia Botmeh.
BDS opponents often say that the economic activism is anti-Semitic, something easily disproved by reading the BDS call.
“BDS does not target individuals but rather government policies that contravene international law and violate human rights,” said Kristin Szremski, AMP national director of media and communications. “BDS is a political action, not a religious one, and it is supported by several Jewish activists and organizations.”
Each year, AMP has seen its boycott grow. Last year, a social media campaign reached 1.6 million people in one hour and the organization distributed 20,000 postcards bearing the boycottable brands across the country. This year, even non-Muslims are requesting date boycott materials, which have been shipped to several states so far.
In keeping with its mission to educate the public, AMP has made materials available for free. Postcards, brochures, talking points, a Power Point Presentation and video are all available for download for people wanting to put on a date boycott presentation or help spread the boycott. For the first time this year, posters are available for storeowners who have pledged to not carry Israeli dates. The posters declare: Proud to be Israeli Occupation Date Free.
More information is available at www.ampalestine.org, or email dateboycott@ampalestine.org for materials.