BDS Victory: Ahava moving factory out of occupied West Bank

March 14th, 2016

Awake Goy

Fantastic news, Haaretz reported Thursday that Ahava Dead Sea cosmetics, a company that pillages mud products from occupied Palestine and longtime target of Code Pink’s Stolen Beauty Ahava boycott campaign, plans to move their factory from the occupied West Bank to within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

The announcement comes after 7 long years, an onslaught of protests including activists chaining themselves to concrete blocks inside Ahava’s London store, and persistent online social media actions by dedicated Code Pink activists spanning continents since the campaign was launched in 2009.

#BDS Win: Their Ahava Twitter party postponed, but our Thunderclap is still a GO! #Palestine pic.twitter.com/I75b5EV3VQ

— Stolen Beauty (@BoycottAhava) March 26, 2015

The video below is the first recored protest by Code Pink activists after the decision was made, to target Ahava. It was taken in front of Hilton Tel Aviv after activists entered the Ahava store in the lobby of the hotel, stripped off their coats revealing their bodies covered in mud as activists crowed the lobby and hallway outside the entrance to the store:

Code Pink Press Release:

We at CODEPINK Women for Peace are pleased to hear that, seven years into the Stolen Beauty Ahava boycott campaign, Ahava Dead Sea Laboratories has announced plans to move their factory from the occupied West Bank to within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.

We attribute this move to the dedicated work of an international coalition of human rights activists—from the U.S. to the U.K., from the Netherlands to South Africa, from Palestine and Israel to France—who have been organizing protests against Ahava’s violations of international law since 2009. We thank all the concerned groups and individuals around the world whose principled actions helped make this change possible.

We will continue pressuring Ahava until the West Bank factory is fully closed. It also remains to be seen whether Ahava, under the new ownership of the Chinese conglomerate Fosun, will cease pillaging mud from the Dead Sea’s occupied shores in the Israeli settlement of Kalya, as has been their practice to date.

A timeline of Stolen Beauty Ahava campaign milestones may be found here.

Haaretz: BDS Target Ahava to Relocate From West Bank Into Israel

Ahava, the Dead Sea cosmetics company that has been a major target of BDS for maintaining a manufacturing plant in the West Bank settlement of Mitzpeh Shalem, will be relocating the facility within Israel’s pre-1967 borders….

In 2011, Ahava was forced to shutter its London store in Covent Garden after months of noisy demonstrations by pro-Palestinian groups. In moving facilities inside Israel proper and out of a West Bank, Ahava is following the lead of SodaStream, the carbonated beverage dispenser manufacturer, which relocated last year from the West Bank industrial zone of Mishor Adumim to the Negev. The move followed an aggressive campaign against SodaStream by the BDS movement abroad.

……Ahava issued a statement …. did not explicitly confirm that the plant at Mitzpeh Shalem will be closing, but that is understood to be the case….

Ahava is privately owned by a number of partners including Gaon Holdings, the Livnat family and kibbutzim in the Dead Sea area including Kibbutz Mitzpeh Shalem. The current owners of the company have been in negotiations with the Fosun Group of China over the sale of the company for up to 300 million shekels ($77 million), but the parties still appear to be the preliminary stage of talks over a possible purchase by the Chinese firm.

WIN: Dutch pharmacy network drops Ahava cosmetics https://t.co/zOfA4XlK9w #BDS #Palestine @Article1C pic.twitter.com/v60q7Xqo8t

— Stolen Beauty (@BoycottAhava) October 1, 2015