SodaStream CEO Daniel Birnbaum said he would shut down the company’s main plant in Israel, in Lehavim in the Northern Negev, if the Israeli government continues to refuse to renew the entry permits of 74 longtime Arab employees living around Jerusalem, the Jerusalem Post reported Friday.
The SodaStream factory in Maale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, is in the process of closing, under pressure from BDS groups in Europe and the US, as well as in order to save $9 million in production costs. The plant’s operations has been transferred to Lehavim, where it is hiring a large number of Bedouins. The closing of the Plant in Judea did nothing to gain favor with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), by the way: noting the SodaStream relocation of its factory as a notch on their belt, they insisted that efforts to boycott SodaStream will continue, even though Lehavim is inside the pre-1967 “green line.” After all you don’t give up a lucrative business just because you won…
The 74 employees Birnbaum is supporting, including both assembly line workers and shift managers, received their entry permits into Israel last fall, after SodaStream had begun closing down its plant in the industrial zone of Mishor Adumim, near Ma’aleh Adumim. Thanks to the successful BDS campaign, another 500 Judea and Samaria Arab SodaStream employees lost their jobs as a result of the plant’s closing. The only Arabs who are allowed to take the 90-minute trip each way to the new location are married with children, and their permits are due to expire on February 29.
“Most of these employees have been with us for six years, and I’ve been begging the government to let me keep them,” Birnbaum said on Wednesday, adding, “These are ambassadors of peace, whom we bus in every day, and it’s been a long, terrible fight with the government to get them to keep their work permits, even though there are more than 100,000 Palestinians working inside Israel every day. But they won’t let my 74 [employees] continue to work. It’s just unbelievable.”