BDS Protesters (Photo citizenside.com)
KLP Fund, Norway’s largest retirement fund, has decided to side with the so called BDS boycott, divest, and sanction movement which works to delegitimize the State of Israel. KLP has severed its financial connections with 16 different Israeli firms because they all, in some way, do business in the West Bank. The total value of the KLP Fund divesture is said to be $32 million.
This is just more BDS BS.
The Israeli firms which must now say goodbye to Norwegian money include telecommunication firms Bezeq and Cellcom simply because they provide services to Israeli settlements. And KLP also divested from banks like Israel’s Bank Leumi because it finances businesses in settlements.
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The firm issued a statement saying that, “In KLP’s assessment, there is an unacceptable risk that the excluded companies are contributing to the abuse of human rights in situations of war and conflict through their links with the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.”
But, really, this is no big deal! Let’s be honest here. Israeli companies are making multi-billion dollar exits on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASADQ all of the time. The country is, per capita, by far the world leader in unicorns, startups worth more than $1 billion. Eighteen Israeli startups hit unicorn status since the start of 2021, seven in the month of June alone.
So $32 million is just a drop in the bucket. And how many people who work for all of these companies live in the West Bank, or what the world calls East Jerusalem. The Israeli company SodaStream once had a factory in the Israeli settlement of Maaleh Adumin, located east of Jerusalem. This factory employed many Arab workers who could not otherwise get jobs in Israel. But SodaStream was forced to relocate the factory to the town of Qyrat Gat due to boycott threats and this simply caused all of those people to lose their jobs.
And just to show how stupid the whole BDS thing is, KLP Fund also divested itself from Motorola Solutions. Why? Because Motorola’s video security and software is used by Israeli security forces for border surveillance. Oh Norway! Well what can you expect from a country that will not join the E.U. officially, but has made dramatic concession over its own sovereignty just to enjoy free trade status with it?
