Thursday, March 19

Palestine Israel Ethical Shopping Initiative

New initiative ? Came across this via the South Somerset Peace Group newsletteter
Palestine Israel Ethical Shopping Initiative

The rationale for the conception and creation of www.easi-piesi.org lies in the belief that few people would, knowingly, seek to benefit through theft from others. Likewise, few would consider taking advantage of the victims of terror and ethnic cleansing. Few would want to reward a military occupier where brutality and wanton killing, the demonising and brutalising of a subjugated people is the hallmark of the occupation

Increasingly there is awareness that trade has an ethical dimension -as witnessed by the plethora of ethical and corporate responsibility statements to be found in the literature of the UK’s major supermarkets. The formation of the Ethical Trading Initiative by the supermarkets is one manifestation of this.

However the defining of ethics as applied to international trade is not the monoply of the UK’s supermarkets. UK shoppers should have a say in the matter, should have a facility whereby they can sensitise the supermarkets to their feelings and demands - with the bonus of knowing that they are helping the supermarkets formulate policy based on what the customer really wants.

Crucially, shoppers should be able to identify products and produce on the supermarket shelf which originates from stolen land or from land under military occupation. Shoppers should be free to shop with a clear conscience knowing they have made an ethical decision to avoid such produce.

By making such an ethical decision they are telling the supermarket, in the most direct manner possible, to cease selling the goods they have chosen to boycott.

Palestine - a stolen land

It was on the 16th September, 1948 that the United Nations appointed mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, completed the report which outlined his plans for the return of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who, in the space of a few months, had either been ethnically cleansed from their land or had fled to safety.

Twenty four hours later, the UN mediator was assassinated at the hands of the terrorist Stern Gang. It is worth noting that two prominent members of this terrorist group, Yitzhak Shamir (directly implicated in the murder) and Menachem Begin, both became prime ministers of Israel.

It is the legacy of this act of murder which resonates throughout the Middle East and the wider world to this day. And this legacy is summed up in the two words “stolen land.”

“Legal” theft


With the assassination of the UN mediator. The question of land ownership and looted Palestinian property was quietly dropped. Crucially, at this point in time, about 94% of land in Palestine was owned by Palestinian Arabs, churches and religious trusts. The remainder was Jewish owned. (In current circumstances, within Israel itself, these statistics are now reversed.)

And how did the state of Israel acquire Palestinian owned land?


[For more & detailed info about supermarkets:-

http://www.easi-piesi.org/index.html
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