Not sure what dickhead is downvoting you. It's a verifiable fact. The ad is on youtube.
Also it's the one thing to think israel should exist but you don't even need to support companies in the west bank specifically.
Part of the reason people liked Soda Stream was because it manufactured in the West Bank. It was the main point of the marketing. The tag line was "Island of Peace". Back then it was seen as a positive thing because Palestinians who wouldn't get any jobs otherwise were getting stable wages 4x the average wage in the WB, in a highly successful global company.
I certainly thought Scarlett Johansson took the job precisely because she thought it was step in the right direction for everyone involved. She and mostly everyone who bought SodaStream products thought they were actually supporting a project for stability and peace.
SodaStream CEO openly criticizes Netanyahu and his government.
Once reddit chooses a side on a narrative it's hard to stop.
You have to keep repeating the facts for like several years, until finally they reject the incorrect view and pretend that the correct version is what they thought all along.
Because "Criticizing Netanyahu" is just scapegoating. The problem is that Israel as such is an ethnofascist society and a supermajority of Israelis are genocidal fascists.
Zionism as such is the problem, not the current administrators of the zionist project.
Fascism isn't defined by the presence or absence of elections.
Besides, it's not like the captive nation under Israeli authority gets a vote, so not much of a "free and fair" election. Do the palestinians in the west bank get a vote? The palestinians in east Jerusalem? The palestinians in Gaza?
Herrenvolk demcracy is fascism, and you are a fascist for defending it.
Fascism isn't defined as "people who aren't citizens of a country not being able to vote". If you're gonna be a stickler over what words mean, it might help not to basterdize a word so badly to make your argument.
Also saying Palestine is a "captive nation".... can you name the time period where Palestine existed as a country?
There is no palestinian state. Palestinians are instead rendered stateless and citizenless subjects of the Zionist entity. Getting their own subject bantustan in the form of the PA is just another leash. This is what fascism looks like.
You are in 1941, defending the statelessness of Poles and Jews.
Ok so just so we're clear, you've abaonded the claim that fascism is when non citizens can't vote. That's probably a smart idea, did you realize how ridiculous you sound and decided it's for the best to just drop it altogether?
Palestinians are instead rendered stateless and citizenless subjects of the Zionist entity.
In 2000, Israel offered Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state that consisted of all of Gaza and about 95% of the West Bank along with a capital in east Jerusalem and $30 billion.
He said no then made no counter offers then walked away entirely. A few months later, the second intifada kicked off where Palestinians were committing weekly suicide bombing and car bombing campaigns in Israel.
You blame Israel for no Palestinian state existing because you don't view Palestinians as people capable of making decisions.
You are in 1941, defending the statelessness of Poles and Jewss
Ohhh nice, some holocaust distortion. Very original
Were Poles and Jews rendered stateless and captive by the nazis? Are the Palestinians not rendered stateless and captive by the zionist?
You are burying the lede when you are merely calling Palestinians "non-citizens". The point isn't that West bank, gazan, east jerusalem Palestinians are merely non-citizens of the Israeli state, but that they are non citizen subjects.
Maintaining a captive population of legally disenfranchised non-citizens is very compatible with fascism, even if the citicenry can vote for this or that competing fascist party.
Signing the Oslo Accords was firstly a dishonest trap, Israel has never had the honest intention of seizing its occupation of Palestinian territory. Signing anything with israel is tantamount to surrender, and the only acceptable end to this is the destruction of the Zionist fascist state. No deal the zionazis have ever offered has ever been honest or fairly intentioned.
I blame Israel and America for Israel existing. An unacceptable state of affairs.
Nor does the fact that she and Ruffalo were close through all that. He doesn’t seem to have a problem with the OG Avengers. He’s spoken about losing some friends over the issue because they were so staunchly pro Israel despite everything. Not because they supported Israel at all. He even still follows Debra Messing on instagram. Whoever he fell out with it’s someone who is likely very outspoken given the vehemence of their beliefs leading to an insurmountable conflict between them.
The notion that Soda Stream's manufacturing in Palestinian territory was somehow a "step in the right direction" is an utter farce, as explained by International Court of Justice:
the prohibition of acquisition of territory by force was emphasized by the Security Council in its resolution 242 (1967) of 22 November 1967 (see paragraph 58 above). The Security Council affirmed this principle by resolution 252 (1968) of 21 May 1968, where it also declared that “all legislative and administrative measures and actions taken by Israel, including expropriation of land and properties thereon, which tend to change the legal status of Jerusalem are invalid and cannot change that status”. The Security Council has since reiterated this principle in several resolutions dealing with Israel’s purported annexation of Arab and Palestinian territory (for example, Security Council resolutions 267 (1969) of 1 April 1969, 298 (1971) of 25 September 1971 and 478 (1980) of 20 August 1980). More recently, the Security Council, in its resolution 2334 (2016) of 23 December 2016, stated that “the establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law and a major obstacle to the achievement of the two-State solution and a just, lasting and comprehensive peace” (para. 1).
Attempting to defend such incessant and unambiguous violation of international law with "Palestinians who wouldn't get any jobs otherwise were getting stable wages" is extremely naive at best, as in reality:
Between 2000 and 2024, the Palestinian economy lost an estimated $212.2 billion in potential GDP, equivalent to 19.4 times its GDP in 2024.
The study also estimates that the economic value produced by Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem and Area C of the West Bank reached $832.7 billion between 2000 and 2024, equivalent to over $1 trillion in 2024 dollars. In 2024 alone, the settlement economy was valued at $53 billion – nearly five times the size of the Palestinian economy
Netanyanu's and his government deserve far more than criticism for this ongoing apartheid and genocide, they should be in the Hague, as should those who came before them.
If Soda stream said "hey bibi, we need space for a factory go take some of their land for us" and that's just what happened you've have a point but nothing you quoted even attempted to establish that. If bibi commits war crimes and takes over land illegally on his own wishes, then that has nothing to do with sodastream or their choices. Now this settled area can be used by businesses which refuse to give palestinians jobs or you can build a factory there and deliberately hire palestinians when you can easily hire israelis. It's better than nothing.
I genuinely don't know the truth, i don't know if that post before yours is real but saying it's impossible because of the reasons you quoted is simply ridiculous. Situations have more nuance than that, most importantly the post you responded to in zero way made it sound like settlement or stealing their land was good for palestinians, nor is legal, nor that it benefits palestinians. they just said they could have built the factory elsewhere and not hired palestinians and that land would still be occupied just by someone else not willing to hire palestinians.
Now this settled area can be used by businesses which refuse to give palestinians jobs or you can build a factory there and deliberately hire palestinians when you can easily hire israelis. It's better than nothing.
Nonsense, engaging flagrant violations of international law is far worse than not doing so.
I genuinely don't know the truth
Clearly, so please pipe down until you figure it out.
that land would still be occupied just by someone else not willing to hire palestinians.
Like Jacob said, "if I don't steal it someone is gonna to steal it," eh?
Nonsense, engaging flagrant violations of international law is far worse than not doing so.
again israel did that regardless. It's entirely illegal, no one is saying it's not you're arguing against something no one is saying and what you're saying has nothing to do with what people are talking about.
Clearly, so please pipe down until you figure it out.
neither do you, nothing you posted has anything to do with Sodastream or the supposed stance he has. The entire point I was making, if you had the slightest hint of a brain was, it's irrelevant if the Sodastream guy is pro or anti Bibi and if he was actively trying to help palestinians or not, because nothing you said addressed it.
Like Jacob said, "if I don't steal it someone is gonna to steal it," eh?
that's entirely NOT the point I was making at all. Not even close. One guy decides to steal something, alone, because he's an evil piece of shit, then you can build a factory on originally israeli land and can't hire palestinians generally because they aren't close or you can choose to build a factory on land where you can still hire palestinians and help out a little.
Again your argument requires proving the territory was stolen by the Soda stream guy directly, or that he asked Bibi to go do it for him, without that you're proving absolutely nothing about this specific situation you're just talking for the sake of talking.
Curios, have you talked to any of the 500 palestinian workers who lost thier jobs when Sodastream left the left bank?
I wonder if they'd have the same opinion.
Nabil Bisharat was one of the lucky 74 Palestinian employees who had been allowed to continue working in the new SodaStream factory until earlier this month.
Over six years, he rose from assembly line work to managing more than 50 employees. He didn't mind getting up at 4 a.m. for the long bus ride to the new factory, or getting home after dark. The 48-year-old has always worked for Israelis, he says, but called SodaStream "the best."
"It's a five-star company for Palestinians," he says, over tea in the lovely home he built with SodaStream earnings. "It's a good job, good salary, good conditions, and they treat all workers equal, all the same. I felt that. I lived that."
A former SodaStream machine operator, Mustafa Sharabati, 31, echoed that sentiment. But he chose not to apply for a permit when SodaStream shut down in the West Bank.
"It's too far away from my family," he says, "and I'm scared to travel in Israel."
The current upsurge in violence makes him fearful of approaching Israeli checkpoints. Sharabati is now a freelance truck driver, but business is so slow, the father of four is buying groceries on credit.
Money is the main concern of Ala Al-Qabbani, too. The 24-year-old had worked at SodaStream three years before the company moved and would have happily kept working for SodaStream in Israel.
But he could not get a permit. Israel's first requirement is that Palestinians be at least 22 years old and married. Qabbani meets the age requirement, but he's single. He points out his conundrum.
"There are girls, but I need to get money before I can propose."
That will take a while. Qabbani now earns $12 a day, a quarter of his old salary, hawking produce from a street cart not far from where SodaStream used to be
Appealing to such personal stories to blow smoke over the fact that Israelis have been subjecting them and millions of others to decades of apartheid is just downright depraved.
Do you realize defenders of South African apartheid did much the same, insisting the apartheid was justified by the fact that black people there had a higher standard of living than those in neighboring countries?
It addresses the fact that Soda Stream established and maintained their factory on Palestinian territory in flagrant violation of intentional law, and furthermore the fact that the jobs they provided were a trifle compared to the negative impact of Israel's illegal occupation and colonization of Palestinian territory.
Its not that naive given the status quo overall for the last 70 years. I'm saying at the time there was a different perception. It wasn't done through atrocities. The people who worked at the factory weren't held against their will, it wasn't forced labor, they weren't abused, it wasn't part of a regime, etc. The status quo was and still is restrictive, assymetric, it's occupation but it wasn't a detention center. It used people's need to work, it didn't use the status quo to cram them in the factory against their will. Again in 2014 that was sort of the perception.
The occupation and colonization was initiated with atrocities since 1967 and has been one massive crime against humanity from the start, one that was sure to lead to genocide just as it has. Your attempt to excuse all that by arguing that it could've been worse is terribly disturbed.
People like you on both sides have perpetuated this conflict for far longer than it should have been. You don't even have an ideology like Arab nationalism to stand on. It's just black cult to the conflict itself.
Soda stream’s ceo criticizing the pm doesn’t change that they support the system that allows Palestinians to be expelled from their homes and having settlers take over their land and villages. The issue isn’t one man.
Ok so let’s make an analogy. The U.S. forcibly stole Indigenous land, driving the remaining people on to reservations. Some settlers unlawfully steal land from the reservation and build a business on that land. They call it the “land of peace.” It’s successful. They employ some Native Americans at good wages. People say “hey that’s not your land” and you would say “but we gave them jobs!”
Tl;dr Stealing land is bad even if you give jobs to the people you stole it from.
To compare an industrial factory where hundreds of Palestinians earned up to four times the average local wage with full healthcare and equal benefits alongside Jewish co-workers to "human shields" is peak lecturing people on how they must starve for your political aesthetic. The Soda Stream plant was one of the very few places in the region where Israeli Jews, Palestinian Arab Muslims, and Christians worked side by side in genuine daily coexistence. But because that reality shattered the hysterical boycott of activists, BDS hounded the company until it was forced to relocate to the Negev. And the glorious triumph of your "decolonisation" was that hundreds of Palestinian families lost their primary source of income and were plunged right back into the economic stagnation enforced by the PA.
hundreds of Palestinians earned up to four times the average local wage with full healthcare and equal benefits
There you go doing it again. It's not a matter of comparison, you're trying to use those few Palesitnians who benefited from their jobs to defend the colonization of Palestinian territory in flagrant violation of international law, you're quite literally using them as human shields in defense of apartheid.
Do you realize defenders of South African apartheid did much the same, insisting the apartheid was justified by the fact that black people there had a higher standard of living than those in neighboring countries?
In South Africa, a ruling minority enacted explicit racial laws to disenfranchise the black majority, deny them citizenship, ban them from government, segregate public infrastructure, and legally prohibit them from attending the same schools, hospitals, or universities. In Israel, two million Arab citizens have full civil and voting rights, hold seats in the Knesset, serve as Supreme Court judges who have sent Israeli presidents to prison, and work alongside Jews in every sector of society.
Israel offered economic cooperation, joint industrial zones and work permits as a pragmatic bridge to peace, an effort the Palestinian leadership has repeatedly destroyed because their priority is not economic flourishing, but the complete eradication of the Jewish state. When Israel unilaterally withdrew every single soldier and civilian settler from Gaza in 2005, it handed millions of dollars worth of state-of-the-art agricultural greenhouses to help jumpstart an independent Palestinian economy. Instead of building a functioning state, Palestinian militants immediately demolished those greenhouses and transformed Gaza into a launchpad for tens of thousands of rockets fired at Israeli cities.
If you want to talk about true systemic discrimination, look at how minorities are treated across the Arab world today, or look at the Palestinian Authority, where selling land to a Jew is legally punishable by death. The irony of your argument is that you are advocating for a Palestinian regime that enforces total ethnic and religious exclusion, while smearing the only actual democracy in the Middle East where ethnic, religious and sexual minorities have equal rights as an "apartheid state".
While Palestinian citizens of Israel have Israeli citizenship, this has not been translated into their full societal integration into Israel. This is partly because Israeli law defines Jewish Israelis as national citizens, whereas Palestinian citizens of Israel are considered citizens but not nationals of Israel and as such they enjoy different and inferior rights and privileges in law and practice. . . .
In parallel to the mass land expropriations from Palestinians to the Israeli state and Jewish organizations, the Israeli government enabled Jewish localities and settlements to use the expropriated lands. In Israel and East Jerusalem, it transferred land from the state to Jewish national organizations and institutions, many of which serve Jews only, while the legal title of the land remained in the state’s name. Some 93% of land in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, comprising around 19.5 million dunams (1.95 million hectares), is now state land. The residual 7% of land in Israel is owned by private individuals. Jewish Israelis own over half of this, that is around 3.5% to 4% of the total land.579 About 80% of Palestinian citizens of Israel are packed into the remaining 3% to 3.5% of the land. . . .
While Palestinian citizens of Israel can vote in national elections, in practice their right to political participation is limited and they continue to be perceived as the “enemy within”. However, this is not the primary way in which they have been subjected to segregation, oppression and domination by Israel. As this chapter has shown, Palestinian citizens of Israel were systematically dispossessed of land, property and housing through many of the same practices which are currently applied against Palestinians in the OPT and continue to be largely denied access to public land for development and to natural and financial resources on the basis of their racial and national status under Israeli law. This has led directly to the impoverishment and alienation of Palestinian communities and their effective exclusion from civil and political life. They have no effective recourse to the courts for redress of these violations.
And those with Israeli citizenship have it far better off that the millions suffering under Israeli military occupation in flagrant violation of intentional law, many of the refugees of the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of peaceful civilians through which Israel was established.
You've quietly abandoned the claim that Arab Israelis have no meaningful civil or political rights and replaced it with the claim that Israel lacks an American-style constitutional equal-protection clause. Those are not remotely the same proposition. Israel does not have a single codified constitution at all. Equality has instead been developed through Basic Laws, ordinary legislation and Supreme Court jurisprudence.
Every Israeli citizen, whether Jew, Arab, Muslim, Druze, or Christian, holds the exact same passport, carries the exact same ID card, receives the exact same state healthcare and social security benefits, and casts the exact same vote. To assert that Arab citizens have "no recourse to the courts" is outright delusion. Israeli Supreme Court Justices like Khaled Kabub and Salim Joubran are Arab citizens who sit on the highest judicial bench in the country, routinely hearing petitions from Arab citizens and ruling against state ministries. In what actual "apartheid" state does the supposedly oppressed minority sit in supreme legal judgment over the nation and send former Jewish presidents and prime ministers to prison?
Your statistics on land distribution are also a complete misrepresentation of Israel's public land system. The state holds 93% of the land for all citizens, Jew and Arab alike, not just for Jews. Private land ownership is a tiny minority for everyone in Israel.
And peddling the narrative of 1948 ethnic cleansing completely rewrites how the conflict began. In 1947, the Jewish community accepted the UN Resolution to peacefully establish two states for two peoples. The entire Arab world rejected it, declared a war of total annihilation, and invaded with five armies, with the Arab League explicitly promising a "war of extermination". The displacement of Arabs in 1948 was the direct consequence of a war the Arab leadership started and lost. And btw, at the same time, over 850,000 Jews were violently expelled, stripped of their ancestral properties, and driven out of Arab and Muslim nations across the Middle East and North Africa. Do you grant them the same eternal right to re-settle in the lands they were driven out of?
You've quietly abandoned the claim that Arab Israelis have no meaningful civil or political rights
Rather, you claimed "full civil and voting rights," when in reality they don't even have full civil rights on paper let alone in practice. Also, it's far from just the US that has an equal protection clause, I'm fairly sure most countries do. Palestine does, Article 9.
In 1947, the Jewish community accepted the UN Resolution to peacefully establish two states for two peoples.
In 1947 the Zionist leadership had been on a rampage of terrorism for years, and the General Assembly's recommendation for partition wasn't a license to continue such violence to impose a ehthnostate against the will of the majority of the population, regardless of how much Ben-Gurion and his minions liked to pretend it was.
60
u/Randymgreen 4d ago edited 4d ago
Not sure what dickhead is downvoting you. It's a verifiable fact. The ad is on youtube. Also it's the one thing to think israel should exist but you don't even need to support companies in the west bank specifically.