BDS South Africa targets Woolworths, Israel – The makings of a misdirected campaign
For more than a year Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) – South Africa, the local chapter of a global movement pushing for boycotts against the State of Israel, has been conducting a very public boycott campaign against Woolworths with the aim of pressurising the company into no longer stocking Israeli-sourced products.
The organisation’s latest, much-hyped publicity stunt was staging a demonstration against US singer Pharrell Williams when he performed in Cape Town last Monday. Williams entered into a partnership with Woolworths to perform in South Africa, and fallen afoul of BDS when he declined to cancel his engagement until Woolworths cut its ties with “apartheid Israel.”
In the weeks leading up to the event, the media was replete with reports on the upcoming confrontation, with added interest being supplied by a failed attempt by the City of Cape Town to obtain a court order limiting the protest to a mere 150 participants.
Ultimately, as it turned out, the court application was unnecessary, since the actual demonstration turned out to be the dampest of squibs. Comprehensive video footage taken of the protest, indicates that a mere 800 protestors turned up in the end, despite the availability of free transport and the explicit backing of, amongst others, the SACP and COSATU, and a whole host of other organisations who are supposedly part of the “national coalition for Palestine.”
The ignominious failure of the Pharrell Williams demo would appear to have revealed, and by no means for the first time, the considerable schism between BDS’ extravagant rhetoric on the one hand and what it is actually able to achieve on the other. This is true, in fact, of the organisation’s whole anti-Woolworths initiative in general.
A misguided and shallow campaign?
At the outset of its boycott campaign, BDS confidently predicted those declining revenues would force the retail giant to reconsider its stance and conclude that maintaining its already limited trade links with Israel (they have sourced just 0.1% of its products from that country) was simply not worth it.
On principle, Woolworths firmly stood its ground from the outset, insisting that it was apolitical and that it was doing nothing illegal by doing business with Israel. It quickly emerged, moreover, that it would lose nothing by doing so. Despite a wave of in-your-face protest actions by BDS around the country and a vociferous campaign in both the mainstream and social media, Woolworths sales figures since the boycott commenced have been completely unaffected; indeed, the opposite would appear to have been the case.
Woolworth’s reported public earnings show that it has recorded strong earnings growth, in line with the broader SA retail sector. In addition, a multitude of market analysts are of the view that Woolworths’ South African earnings are set to continue showing positive momentum. The BDS boycott campaign has evidently also done nothing to harm the company’s public image. This is hardly surprising when last week it was announced that Woolworths had retained its position as South Africa’s most reputable company in the annual Reputation Institute’s National RepTrak Pulse survey for 2015.
Facts do matter
To disguise these transparent failures to deliver on its promises, BDS has been playing an elaborate game of smoke and mirrors, issuing statements that might charitably be called “grossly misleading” that with equal justification could be regarded as downright falsehoods. In March this year, it announced that in terms of an “independent impact report” by an unidentified “Wits university researcher” that the boycott campaign was costing Woolworths R8 million per month and that the true loss to the company “could be in the hundreds of millions”. The “independent researcher”, sometimes referred to as “Professor”, turned out to be Sociology student Clara Gatenby, who aside from having no financial expertise also just happens to be a BDS activist.
Another piece of questionable ‘evidence’ that BDS served on the media was its “Woolworths Shareholders Press Conference” last November. How they did this was first to have some of their members buy a limited number of Woolworths shares, thereby officially giving them shareholder status, and then to arrange some pseudo “shareholders meeting” at which the latter purported to express their deep concern over the company’s Israel links. Astonishingly, many of the South African media groups overwhelmingly reported on the event as if it was a genuine Woolworths shareholders’ gathering.
The mere fact that BDS is, to put it diplomatically, economical with the truth should be enough for us to treat its claims with caution. However, there are further, even more compelling reasons why we should do so. The Woolworths boycott campaign has shown that BDS has no compunction about resorting to intimidation, harassment, insults and threats in order to bully Woolworths’ patrons and employees, and the public at large, into acquiescing to its agenda.
In the end, it led to Woolworths to ask for, and being granted, a court order prohibiting BDS from “organising, coordinating or encouraging harassment, intimidation and/or the causing of psychological harm of Woolworths employees or customers, or engaging in any form of protest action inside Woolworths’ stores”.
A cheap provocation targeting the South African Jewish community?
BDS’ antics have unfortunately gone beyond merely misleading the public and causing some minor annoyance for a local retailer. As a result of its inflammatory rhetoric (replete with lurid charges of mass slaughter against innocent Palestinians), numerous ugly incidents have occurred throughout the country, including gross cases of anti-Semitism.
Two incidents in particular highlight how BDS tactics have served only to generate hatred between South Africans and undermine public order. One took place last October, when the BDS’s campaign resulted in Congress of South African Students in the Western Cape depositing a pig’s head in what was believed to be the kosher meat section of a Woolworths store in Sea Point. In a press statement, they declared that it would “not allow people who will not eat pork to pretend that they are eating clean meat, when it is sold by hands dripping with the blood of Palestinian children”. BDS, as has been the case with similar such racist invective against South African Jewry, signally failed to condemn this grotesque display of anti-Semitic bigotry.
The second incident took place in March this year, when dozens of youths ran amok in a Woolworths store in Pretoria, stealing goods collectively worth R200 000 whilst shouting such slogans as “Israel is the devil” and depositing BDS leaflets and posters at the scene. Twenty-one were subsequently arrested and charged with looting and malicious damage to property. Again, BDS made no move to condemn the incident.
Add to all of this the violation, through the orchestrated acts of disruption and intimidation, of the right of those wishing to shop at Woolworths without being harassed, or of Woolworths employees to do their jobs without being subjected to threats and crude insults, one begins to realise the extent of the harm being done by BDS radicals to the fabric of our society. Such actions have not caused the slightest harm to Israel, nor have they helped the Palestinians in any way. Instead, they have sown further discord and division in a country already plagued by such ills.
In the final analysis, Woolworths says that pro-Palestinian activism had little impact in their charity fund-raising attempts with Pharrell Williams. Woolworths CEO Ian Moir spoke at a primary school in Soweto where Williams planted a tree as part of a school charity campaign. Moir added that BDS SA’s protest at Williams’ concert in Cape Town was unsuccessful.
Begging the question then, what has BDS actually achieved, if not simply to rile up misdirected anger and anti-Semitism in South Africa? It is no wonder that BDS’ national coordinator, Muhammad Desai, reportedly stated that “for those of your comrades and friends that have gone back to Woolworths, we know you, where know where you live, come back home” – suggesting that all is not well with the Woolworths campaign. Failure and compassion fatigue of a pro-Palestinian campaign that has long veered off course, has set in – BDS, of course, would want us to be believe otherwise.
Mzoxolo Mpolase, is an Analyst at Political Analysis South Africa and frequently writes on topics covering political strategy, party politics, labour and diplomacy.
