By David K. Shipler
A couple of
years ago, a retired Israeli journalist, Yehuda Litani, walked into his
favorite local grocery store in Jerusalem and noticed cartons of eggs from a
Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. He had words with the storekeeper.
“I asked the grocer to bring eggs from other sources,” Yehuda told me. “He
refused, and I stopped buying there since that day.”
Such
settlements are widely considered by the Israeli left—and officially by the
U.S. government—as obstacles to the eventual creation of a Palestinian state on
West Bank territory, which was captured by Israel from Jordan during the 1967
war. The settlements have spread and grown into commercial enterprises, and
leading settlers have risen into the ranks of the parliament and government.
For this and other reasons, the door appears to be closing on a two-state solution.
So Yehuda, who speaks Arabic as
well as Hebrew, and who covered the West Bank as a reporter, has mounted his tiny,
principled boycott. He has no illusions. “Some of my friends in Jerusalem are
behaving the same way,” Yehuda emailed, “but I must say that we are but a small
minority—most people do not care about the exact source of the agricultural
products they are buying.”
The
question of how and whether to use purchasing and investing power to influence
Israeli policy has inflamed some campuses in the U.S. and Europe, mobilized
several Protestant church assemblies in the U.S., and alarmed the Israeli government
and its American supporters. Boycott proponents comprise all sorts of folks:
the idealistic, the malicious, the honorable, the anti-Semitic, those who think
they are trying to save Israel from an immoral quagmire, and those who care
nothing for Israel’s continued existence.
