ECONOMIC BOYCOTT

The Birmingham Bus Boycott was one of the successful moves in the American Civil Rights campaign.The same method is now been used in Palestine, and we will have to see how things work out.

Still, at Harriet Sherwood reports for The Guardian, the campaign is showing some early success:

Israeli factories based in settlements on the West Bank have been forced to cut back production as a growing Palestinian boycott movement begins to take effect.

The boycott, endorsed by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, was given further momentum this week when a campaign to clear supermarket shelves of produce originating in settlements was rolled out in Ramallah.

“The objective is to ensure the Palestinian market is free of Israeli settlement produce by the end of this year,” the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, said at the launch of the Store to Store campaign at the Alameen supermarket.

A team of volunteers will inspect 66,000 stores across the West Bank in the coming weeks, awarding certificates and window stickers to those free of settlement produce.

After a period of grace, shopkeepers retaining such produce in their stores could be liable to a fine of more than £9,000 or up to five years in prison under a law already passed but not yet enforced by the Palestinian legislative council.

“This is the daily expression of rejection of the occupation,” Fayyad said. “It will help ensure that the Palestinian economy is self-sufficient. There will not be a store in Palestine which cannot carry our stickers.”

The pro-boycott campaigners are careful to draw a distinction between produce from West Bank settlements, which are illegal under international law, and produce originating from within Israel. The latter will continue to be sold in Palestinian shops.

. . . The West Bank market is worth around $200m (£133m) a year to Israeli businesses. But some settlement factories sell about 30% of their output to the Palestinian market, and the boycott is already having an impact on them.

Confrontations are very dramatic, and often lead to violence, especially when met by those such as the Israeli Government that use extreme violence as stock in trade, so it is very useful to exercise other means of making the same point.

ELSEWHERE:

Juan Cole is suggesting that Israel will not be able to bully Turkey, and looks to be coming off second-best, which in due course may lead to a reconfiguration of policy in Israel, if not a change of heart and mind.