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Source: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/park-slope-ny-voted-against-palestinians/
Boycotting Israeli Snacks in Brooklyn Doesn't Help the Palestinian People
(Times of Israel) Bassem Eid - Members of the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn, who voted on May 26 to remove Israeli-made products, did nothing to help Palestinians. Not a single Palestinian life will change for the better because of this vote. When international BDS pressure forced SodaStream to relocate its production facility out of the West Bank, 500 Palestinian workers lost their jobs. These were men and women earning wages, feeding families, and building lives through participation in a joint Israeli-Palestinian enterprise. As NPR reported, one worker had earned $1,500 a month at the factory; afterward, he made a quarter of that selling produce from a street cart. The BDS movement called the factory closure a victory; it was anything but for Palestinian workers. BDS does not build Palestinian hospitals. It does not fund Palestinian universities. It does not support the civil society organizations, the professional associations, or the municipal institutions that would need to exist in order for Palestinian self-governance to function. What helps my fellow Palestinians is economic development, civil society investment, education reform that teaches children science and history rather than martyrdom, and coexistence with Israel built on shared infrastructure and mutual recognition. A Palestinian future worth fighting for is one built by Palestinian entrepreneurs with economic ties with their Israeli neighbors. That future cannot be built by a food cooperative deciding which olive oil is morally acceptable. It can only be built by people who stop performing "solidarity" from a safe distance and start asking what Palestinians actually need - and the answer has never been a boycott. The writer is a Palestinian peace advocate, political analyst, and human rights pioneer who founded the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group in 1996.