Charitable Bullying

"[Soda Stream] is not only committed to the environment but to building a bridge to peace between Israel and Palestine, supporting neighbours working alongside each other, receiving equal pay, equal benefits and equal rights."
Scarlett Johansson, American Actor

SodaStream unveils Scarlett Johansson as its first-ever Global Brand Ambassador at the Gramercy Park Hotel on January 10, 2014 in New York City.(AFP Photo / Mike Coppola)

Oxfam doesn't agree. It, along with the European Union, and the Liberal-left in unions, academia, and anywhere that Israel is held to a standard according to high-minded values that no other nation on Earth obeys, insists that Israel must conform to their vision of how it should manage its affairs, not how Israel believes it views its priorities and needs.

The Palestinians may do as they wish, whatever they wish, however they might decide to express themselves. If violence is the order of their day, then so be it, for no one, it appears, has expectations that they must accord their behaviour in reflection of what any outside sources views normally as civil and responsible. They march to a different drummer, one of institutionalized victimhood in never-ending refugee-ism.

They have a mantra that repeats they have been the hapless victim of a grave injustice. That they were offered equal opportunity to the Jewish contingent in the area in 1948, and their judgement ordered them to angrily reject partition of Palestine, while Israel grasped at the nation-building opportunity is simply what one might expect of Arab Palestinians. The Jewish Palestinians reacted with joy, their counterparts with venomous denial.

After countless efforts at conciliation, and countless rebuffs, and a final collective Arab nation attack in 1967, Israel was reunited at long last with its sacred heritage in East Jerusalem. As an ancient people who managed against all odds to survive every effort of a hostile world to destroy them, Jews have a right and an obligation to themselves and posterity to cling to what is rightfully theirs.

What makes East Jerusalem a candidate for a future Palestinian state capital, as a people who entered the territory a century ago, while Jews remained living there for three millennia?

SodaStream, representing yet another successful Israeli enterprise, has 25 factories in operation around the world. There is one located in the West Bank, close to a settlement in an area captured by Israel during the 1967 war. But the worldwide Boycott-Divestment movement embarked upon by sympathizers of the Palestinian 'cause', orchestrated by a compassion-savvy manipulating PA, seeks to sanction and bring to ruin any company existing in the West Bank.

How hoping to disrupt and even destroy the Israeli economy can be of use to the Palestinians when those companies generally employ Palestinian labour where no other employment is available to them is beyond imagination. The 500 Palestinians who work at the Ma'ale Adumim factory receive similar wages to the Jewish and Arab Israelis who work at that factory. On site at the factory is a synagogue and a mosque.

All workers at the factory share a dining hall, as well as other common areas adding to the quality of the working experience there. Palestinian workers employed by SodaStream receive three times the working wage of typical West Bank employment, if they can find those jobs. Closing the factory would obviously impact negatively on those Palestinians who work there.

That, aside from the leverage that the Israel-condemning Liberal-left is attempting to exert on Israel to force it to see the situation from their perspective, not from Israel's. That coercion is inclusive of the general insistence that it is Israel that must accede to Palestinian demands before both will agree to a peace process resulting in two side-by-side states. With no one questioning the Palestinian commitment to consummating a peace agreement.

That commitment appears elusive. From all indications, including interior propaganda inclusive of school curricula for Palestinian children, television programs using cartoons to instruct Palestinian children that Israel is their enemy and it will become their duty as mature Palestinians to continue to reject any manner of acceptance of a Jewish presence in what they must consider Palestinian land, the insistence of 'right of return', and the outright refusal to permit 'even one Jew' to pollute with their presence the new state, speaks volumes about Palestinian commitment to peace.

Charitable organizations such as Oxfam like the recipients of their charity to be properly grateful, and no doubt they are. Acquiring the altruistic usefulness of public celebrities to advance their message sometimes comes up hard against the reality that some of those who agree to work on their behalf as goodwill ambassadors cannot find it in themselves to agree with their political intervention intent on bullying a nation at risk of terrorist attacks from the very factions that Oxfam considers victims.

And people looking in from afar can decide for themselves whether they would prefer to offer their charitable dollars to organizations doing good who focus on doing just that, and not using their global reach to victimize another victim of world opprobrium.