On Singing Songs and Boycotting &#8216

On singing songs and boycotting ‘Ahava’ Last Saturday night, I attended the Peoples’ Voice Cafe in New York for the first time. It’s a kind of left-wing nightclub and hangout that’s been around for a long time. Interestingly, I see that it closed for Yom Kippur, and I know that it used to be housed in the old Workmen’s Circle & Jewish Daily Forward building, which was sold a year or two ago. One of the performers was a satirical singer named Dave Lippman, a talented and funny guy. But unfortunately for my comfort level, one of his songs savagely went after Ahava, the Israeli cosmetics company. I understand from someone I know who also was there, that Lippman is Jewish (at least nominally) but feels absolutely no sympathy or compassion for Israel, not even according it a right to exist. And his lyrics, which included the words “apartheid” and “ethnic cleansing,” illustrate his contempt. Still, Meretz USA includes Ahava on its “don’t buy” list of West Bank settlement products. An Ahava factory for refining Dead Sea minerals is located at Mitzpe Shalem — a West Bank settlement. Once a Nahal military outpost, it became a kibbutz in 1976 and is now a privatized cooperative community with about 200 residents. It is located in a desolate part of the West Bank that is very sparsely populated. I see no evidence that any Palestinians were displaced from there. Perhaps the minerals are “stolen” from a West Bank shore of the Dead Sea, but this has nothing to do with “ethnic cleansing.” Wikipedia says the following about its illegal status: Mitzpe Shalem is considered illegal under international law, though Israeli disputes this. The international community considers Israeli settlements to violate the Fourth Geneva Convention‘s prohibition on the transfer of an occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory. Israeli government counters this by contending that the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply to the Palestinian territories because they were not under the legitimate sovereignty of any state.[1] This view has been rejected as without basis in international law by the International Court of Justice and the International Committee of the Red Cross.[2 I don’t blame the people of Mitzpe Shalem personally for settling there. They went as supporters of Labor in the 1970s, and have lived there for nearly two generations. But I certainly understand why Meretz USA is boycotting. I just wish that Dave Lippman, and those who enthusiastically sang along with his overly harsh lyrics, had a more nuanced understanding of the nature of Israel and all that’s driven its tragic conflict with the Palestinians and other Arabs..

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