From MEMRI:
Palestinian BDS Operatives: Activities of US Peace Groups Are Destroying Anti-Normalization Efforts
Gaza BDS activist Haidar Eid said that there was resentment among BDS activists toward Palestinian authorities for allowing American peace groups such as One Voice, Seeds of Peace, and the Peace Alliance, to operate in the West Bank and Gaza. “Allowing such groups to operate in the Gaza Strip destroys the boycott campaign,” he said.
BDS activist Omar Barghouti said that the Right of Return was “the most important of the three rights upon which we are insisting.”
They were speaking on the Lebanese channel Palestine Today TV on April 10, 2016.
Barghouti (who, remember, went to Tel Aviv University while saying that all normalization with Israel by everyone else is absolutely prohibited) gives a nice list of BDS fails in the Arab world:
– Israeli security delegations in Saudi Arabia
– Israeli sports delegations in Qatar
– Israeli trade delegations in the UAE
– Other Israeli delegations in Bahrain, Morocco and elsewhere.
Barghouti laments how poorly the BDS movement is doing among his Arab brethren at the same time he tells Bloomberg News that even though Israel’s foreign investment has tripled since he started the BDS movement, “BDS is not just working. It is working far better and spreading into the mainstream much faster than we had anticipated.”
Bloomberg notes:
Despite the appreciating shekel — a sign of foreign investor confidence — Israeli startups raised $3.76 billion last year from non-Israeli investors, the highest annual amount in a decade, according to data collected by IVC Research Center. Foreigners, who are responsible for at least 50 percent of total yearly investment in Israeli startups, spent an additional $5.89 billion acquiring them. Chinese buyout firm XIO Group’s $510 million purchase of Lumenis Ltd. led high-tech mergers and acquisitions followed by a U.S. private equity firm’s $438 million buyout of ClickSoftware Technologies Ltd. (Acquisitions aren’t captured as part of foreign investment in startups.)
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