JERUSALEM — The last Palestinian employees of SodaStream lost their jobs following the company’s move from the West Bank to southern Israel.
The final 74 employees had been commuting to the company’s new location in the Negev desert since the plant in Maale Adumim closed in October. Some 500 Palestinian employees lost their jobs at that time. Israel gave the final 74 employees permission to enter the country and continue to work for SodaStream until the end of February.
The company had planned to have a going away ceremony for them, APF reported on Monday.
SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum had threatened to halt production at its factory unless the workers were given permits, a threat which it later abandoned. The new plant employs a significant number of Bedouin Arabs, particularly women.
SodaStream, which produces soda-making machines for the home, announced in October 2014 that it would close its West Bank factory in the face of international pressure from the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, or BDS, which seeks to hurt Israel’s economy over its policies toward Palestinians.
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The movement claimed that SodaStream discriminated against Palestinian workers and paid some less than Israeli workers. In a recent interview, Birnbaum alleged that “brutal BDS tactics” harmed the 500 Palestinians who lost their jobs after the West Bank factory was shut down. “SodaStream should have been encouraged in the West Bank if [the BDS movement] truly cared about the Palestinian people,” he said.
SodaStream was at the centre of controversy following the signing in 2014 of actress Scarlett Johansson as a spokeswoman and the ensuing furor over its West Bank factory. Johansson resigned as a global ambassador for Oxfam over her position with SodaStream.
Following SodaStream’s announcement that it would relocate, Ramah Kudaimi of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, a national coalition of more than 400 groups, said in a statement that the company would remain a target of boycott efforts since its new factory is close to Rahat, a planned township in the Negev desert for Bedouins, “thus still implicating the company in Israel’s displacement policies.”
