TORONTO — The pro-Israel community in Canada is fed up with the seemingly endless boycott and divestment threats against the Jewish state, and its members aren’t going to take it anymore.
Sara Saber-Freedman
That’s essentially the message of the Canada-Israel Committee’s (CIC) new Buycott Israel initiative, an online tool the CIC has constructed to alert members on its e-mail registry about boycott attempts on Israeli products in Canada, and in response urge mass purchasing in support of the products.
The project has been launched in partnership with the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver and UJA Federation of Toronto.
In an interview from her Montreal office last week, CIC executive vice-president Sara Saber-Freedman said her organization noted the success of prior community responses to boycott attempts and decided this was the best way to mount grassroots countermeasures to anti-Zionist initiatives.
She referred specifically to two successful efforts to defeat boycotts over the past year, one by members of Mountain Equipment Co-op in Vancouver who tried to have the company adopt a resolution to drop all products it sourced from Israel, and the other in Toronto at a local LCBO store, where supporters of Israel bought up Israeli wines in solidarity with the Jewish state when anti-Zionists tried to boycott the products.
“There are far more people who support Israel than those against it,” Saber-Freedman said.
“And we wanted to launch the campaign now… because it’s a timely moment with everything going on at the [Toronto International Film Festival],” she added, referring to protests against the film fest’s decision to showcase Tel Aviv films.
The CIC is keeping a close watch on the Vancouver community, she said, because it’s believed the same people who put forward the Mountain Equipment Co-op boycott motion against Israeli-made products will try again at next year’s annual meeting.
But Saber-Freedman was careful to note that the Buycott Israel project is “not a commercial undertaking” and won’t promote individual products unless they’re targeted.
Buycott Israel is “a tool for specific action… for when an Israeli product or event is under assault by people who want to delegitimize Israel,” she said.
She added: “This is the most direct way we can say to anti-Israel activists… that not only will they not succeed in boycotting Israeli products, in fact, the [effect] will be just the opposite and will result in more sales of a particular product.”
The Buycott Israel website went online on Sept. 11, and the committee is promoting it via its internal distribution lists and through its “network of friends” in synagogues and the Christian community, she said, noting that the CIC’s board of directors includes a number of non-Jews who “are very well connected” in their own communities.
“People in the pro-Israel community – not just the Jewish community, but Israel’s many friends in Canada – have asked for ways to take direct action against this nonsense, the dishonest attempts to demonize Israel… This is an opportunity for them to do that in a very simple, direct way.”
For more information or to register, visit www.buycottisrael.ca.