TORONTO — The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) says it will never capitulate to calls to boycott Israeli products.
The Bay at Yonge and Queen in downtown Toronto
That’s the message the Canadian retail giant delivered to the Jewish community late last week in the wake of persistent rumours that it had acceded to the demands of a pro-Palestinian group that urged it to stop carrying Israeli-made Ahava cosmetics.
Those rumours were further fuelled by a mishandled public relations response that had senior HBC management scrambling to deny that the iconic Canadian retailer had succumbed to calls for it to boycott Ahava products after the company quietly pulled the Israeli-made beauty line from its shelves nationwide early last week.
When Canadian Ahava consumers noticed that the line was missing from HBC’s stock last week, they began questioning the retailer about why, but they got little response from the company.
It was this lack of an initial coherent answer from HBC that caused the rumour to grow virally within the Jewish community via e-mail and social networking sites such as Facebook.
At the same time, a pro-Palestinian coalition called Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) was in the midst of targeting HBC and Sears in alerts to its members, asking them to send e-mails to store executives calling on them to boycott Ahava products. (Sears didn’t pull the brand from its shelves.)
The resulting rumour and misinformation caused an initial surge of negative reaction in the Jewish community and by community organizations such as B’nai Brith and Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center and the pro-Israel Buycott Israel campaign – run under the auspices of the Canada-Israel Committee (CIC) by Sara Saber-Freedman, its executive vice-president – all of whom urged HBC to clarify its position regarding CJPME’s campaign.
An HBC spokesperson initially told The CJN on Jan. 12 that the company had removed Ahava products purely as a business decision, saying the line was underperforming in sales and would be replaced by another, more profitable product.
“The Bay, as with all retailers, edit their assortments multiple times a year. Ahava is on consignment and from a business perspective has not been meeting expectations. As such the decision was made to de-list it in stores,” the spokesperson said
However, on Jan. 13, in reaction to Jewish community outcry over what was reported to be the Bay’s boycott of Ahava products, and to clarify its position, the company’s CEO, Bonnie Brooks, issued a joint statement with CIC national chair Moshe Ronen and UJA Federation of Greater Toronto saying that HBC would never succumb to political pressure regarding any of its products.
“HBC has made it clear that it has not ‘bowed to political pressure’ in the past, has not done so now and will not do so in the future. HBC neither subscribes to nor endorses politically motivated boycotts of merchandise from countries with which Canada has open and established trading relationships, including Israel,” the company said.
Additionally, HBC said that it intends to re-stock Ahava in the spring, when the brand relaunches with a new look.
“In rejecting the premise of boycott and revealing that it will continue to sell Ahava products when the line is relaunched this spring, the Bay has completely discredited baseless claims” by anti-Israel activists who had, early last week, heralded a victory over HBC to boycott Ahava, Ronen said.
A statement last week by Ahava’s North American CEO, Yacov Ellis, confirmed his company was indeed in the process of rebranding its product lines for the North American market, its largest outside Israel.
Representatives from UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, CIC and other community groups held numerous talks with HBC senior management last week and were satisfied the company understood the sensitive nature of the issue, Saber-Freedman said.
“Because of the extraordinary outpouring of concern by the pro-Israel community, the Bay has done something, to my knowledge, no other Canadian retailer has done: take a public, principled position in which it rejects political boycott of Israel or any other country with which Canada has open trading agreements,” Saber-Freedman said.
“The Bay’s reaction is a significant defeat for Israel’s enemies.”
Stephen Cummings, chair of the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy (CIJA) added: “For Canada’s flagship retailer to publicly dismiss the boycott serves as an important benchmark for responsible corporate practice. For those organizations engaged in an obsessive campaign to isolate Israel, it represents a resounding – indeed embarrassing – defeat.”
The international boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel claimed victory in Britain this week when leading British retailer John Lewis announced it would no longer sell Ahava products.
With files from JTA
