The news that the Co-op society has voted to boycott Israeli produce prompts further thinking about the effectiveness of such consumer boycotts, for instance, medjool dates from Palestine.
A history of boycotting
Boycotting goods from oppressive societies has been a tool of campaigners for over two hundred years. In 1788, anti-slavery campaigners convinced at least 300,000 shoppers in Britain to not buy sugar from the slave plantations. From the 1960s the anti-apartheid movement vigorously publicised a message of boycotting South African goods, following a call to action by Chief Albert Luthuli in 1959. The iconic boycott product was Outspan oranges, then sold all throughout the British winter and always stamped with the brand on the peel. I used to trigger little arguments at market fruit stalls by remarking “Oh, Outspan oranges from South Africa – I don’t buy those.” In the middle of winter, this was quite a sacrifice as South Africa was then the only source of citrus fruit.
Whether these consumer boycotts change politics or not is an open question. The effect on trade of a small proportion of shoppers avoiding the produce may be negligible but as a campaigning tool, historians comment on its effectiveness. The abolitionists both promoted sugar boycotts and organised petitions, which eventually led to the anti-slavery acts in Parliament. The Outspan orange boycott led on to campaigns to disinvest in South African gold and diamond mining companies, which also forced those companies to improve their labour practices once they were more in the public spotlight.
The demand of ethical consumption
I was active in the early days of the ethical investment movement. I can recall trying to phone the Church commissioners (from a coin box phone in the Students Union!) to make an appointment to discuss more ethical investment of their substantial finance. Judging by the guarded response, in a voice like Sir Humphrey from Yes, Minister, we must have been one of the first to raise the subject in those days with them.
In subsequent decades, both ethical investment and fairtrade practice and principles have become much better known and more sophisticated. Traidcraft, with its warehouse and HQ in Newcastle, developed an astonishing array of craft products sourced overseas for its Christmas catalogue, and kept its supporters onside for the rest of the year with its staples of fairtrade tea and coffee. The branding of fair trade was so successful that mainstream supermarkets took over the branding and sometimes the product lines, so much so that Traidcraft has now closed shop.
Of course, there is always scepticism about whether the reality fits the message. Did the surplus from paying higher ethical prices really reach the primary producers, the people who actually toiled with the planting and the harvesting? Reporters have gone to the primary sites to find out. Even today, surveys by the top traders (cocoa trade for example) have to admit that child labour is a traditional practice among its primary suppliers, even though it is officially illegal.
Ethical investment is much better researched these days. The Ethical Consumer, for example, focuses on different topics for each monthly issue. It used to be mainly on products, for instance the ‘best’ washing machine to buy, whereas now there are issues on which bank is most ethical. Triodos came out on top, so I have switched there. The most recent issue is entitled The Power of your Money: How to do good with your investments. What is most commendable is that their tables of good to worse to bad are not on one parameter only. For products, for example, they calculate not only price and functionality but also energy consumption, and even tax transparency, and labour relations. Ethics is multi-dimensional.
The Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement
This is also true on the issue of Palestine and Israel. The BDS movement of disengaging with Israel predates the recent violence in Gaza, and was started in 2005 following a call by Palestinian leaders for cultural and academic boycotts in 2004. The BDS website declares:
“World renowned public intellectuals, academics, writers, artists, musicians and other cultural workers have now endorsed the academic and cultural boycott call; their names are too many to note here, but the interested reader can consult the PACBI website.”
Although some liberal-thinking Jews within Israel and the Jewish diaspora supported boycotts, especially those against produce from lands taken recently from Palestinians, the Israeli government moved to make this illegal:
“The Israelis have recently passed a so-called ‘anti-Boycott law’, which opens Israelis who support any form of boycott, even if it’s limited to settlement products, to significant civil penalties and lawsuits to force them to stop their actions.”
In recent years, travellers seeking a visa to visit Israel have to sign a statement that they have not joined any boycott Israel campaign.
Why you should #ChecktheDate
Why are dates specifically important, even to the internal Israeli boycott? There is a telling 2011 article on this in the Guardian which points out the decline of Palestinians’ agricultural output since the Oslo Accords of 1993, mainly because of Jewish settlers destroying the olive groves Palestinians had farmed for centuries in the West Bank. The article describes how one prominent Arab farmer then invested in planting medjool dates in the Jordan Valley instead, relying entirely on his retirement savings because Israeli banks refused to give him loans.
By 2011 the business owned six farms with 20,000 date trees and over 100 employees to export the dates. But they are more expensive than dates grown by Israelis. This is because new Jewish settlements (some 28 in the Jordan Valley) use so much of the water, as permitted by the Oslo II Agreement, that it deprives Palestinians of water needed for agriculture. Now, they pay for water to be trucked in, as well as Israeli middlemen to drive their freights to the border and through the port.
Since 2011, the position of Palestinians in the West Bank has gotten worse, and there are even more Jewish settlements on lands which, according to the Oslo accords, were to be within Palestine under any two-state solution. An article in Al Jazeera states that approximately 40% of Israeli dates today are grown in these settlements but often using exploited Arab labour including children. The five major brands which export these dates are Hadiklaim (Jordan River and King Solomon); Mehadrin, Galilee Export and Carmel Agrexco, and Agrifood Marketing.
Shopping for medjool dates from Palestine
Wanting to be sure I was not buying dates from any of these companies, I set out to explore the stock of a local Halal shop. Sure enough, they sell Palestinian Medjool dates. As I paid, I noticed the Syrian flag behind the till, and the proprietor told me he is Syrian.
‘How is it in Syria now?’ I asked.
‘Better, much better’, he replied. ‘I was there last month to see my family’.
So, at least a bit of good news with my Medjool dates, from a troubled part of the world.
