How to get core charge of soda stream back
And the moment that SodaStream relocated to inside Israel, it was required to comply with Israeli labor laws. An official who asked not to be named was adamant that Birnbaum, in relocating his factory, had caved under pressure from the BDS movement.
The Prime Minister’s Office tells a very different story. Apparently our 74 Palestinians represent a threat to his agenda.” He’s breeding separatism between Israel and world Jewry on issues such as ‘Who is a Jew?’ and taking sides in American politics… With such a separatist track record, it’s no wonder that he won’t embrace a straightforward solution to lower the flames and build a bridge to coexistence. “Bibi is systematically spreading hate within Israel between Jews and Arabs and between Orthodox and secular. But the prime minister, he charged, is pursuing a different agenda. The Palestinians who used to work for SodaStream were “visual proof that Israel is not an apartheid state,” Birnbaum said. Instead, “the Prime Minister’s Office actually intervened to stop the employment of our Palestinians so that Bibi can then point a finger at the BDS.” “Bibi should be coming here and convincing me to continue what I’ve been doing with the Palestinians because it gives hope to the next generation,” Birnbaum said.
While the new factory employs 500 Bedouin from nearby Rahat, he said, it is no longer permitted to provide work for a single one of its former Palestinian employees, some of whom had worked for SodaStream for six years, and many of whom were wonderful ambassadors for Israel.Ĭalling Netanyahu “the prime minister of conflict,” Birnbaum accused him of a direct role in dismantling what he called the “island of peace” that SodaStream had fostered between its Israeli and Palestinian workers. And since February, said Birnbaum, those last 74 have also been barred from Israel, their permits retroactively canceled. Subsequently, new conditions were imposed and that number was reduced to 74. It sought to retain 350 of its 500 Palestinian workers at the new Lehavim plant, but was granted permits for only 120. This false narrative, he said, is utilized by the Netanyahu government as ostensible proof that when Israelis try to build a better environment with and for the Palestinians, the Palestinian leadership and the BDS movement make it impossible.Īs the government well knows, however, said Birnbaum, SodaStream relocated from the Mishor Adumim industrial park in the West Bank to Lehavim in the Negev in 2014 because it needed considerably more space, in a move it had begun planning long before and one that had nothing to do with BDS. He charged that the government knowingly perpetuates a false narrative according to which SodaStream was forced under pressure from the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement to close its West Bank factory and fire the 500 Palestinians who worked under conditions equal to those of the 700 Israeli Jews and Arabs there. In an interview with The Times of Israel, the carbonated drinks firm’s CEO Daniel Birnbaum charged Netanyahu was personally involved in the bureaucratic process that saw all of SodaStream’s Palestinian employees gradually barred in recent months from working at the company’s factory in the Negev. The head of SodaStream has issued a bitter critique of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government, accusing the prime minister of cynically and deliberately nurturing the conflict with the Palestinians “in all its evil manifestations.”