Saturday, October 11, 2008

Protest in Jordan

""We are protesting because these fruits are planted in our Arab land that was taken by Zionist settlers by forces," said Badi Al-Rafiah, head of a committee against normalization in the 14-member Professional Associations Union.

"Buying Israeli products helps support Israeli farmers who were paying taxes to the military effort to crush and oppress Palestinians," said Abdullah Yusef, a protester.

Jordanian trade figures show bilateral trade is in fact on the rise, with the volume of exchange jumping from $1.6 million in 2003 to $14 million in 2007, representing a nine-fold increase."

Marcy sent me this link and titled it "good news". I don't agree that this is good news; this is just a painful reminder of reality! Could you have imagined in the 1970's that one day Arabs would be protesting against imports of Israeli goods? Imports sanctioned by their own rulers? Imports worth $14 millions? Imports that triple every year? This would have been unthinkable! In Lebanon, normalization is still a long way, although many have been pushing for it, for the sake of sectarian agendas rather than by conviction, it must be said. At one point, they actually believed they had it made. But the Resistance turned the tables in July 2006. And the normalizers became irrelevant.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

rami, it's good news in that it shows that some jordanians are finally waking up! of course, it would be far better if jordan had principles and never normalized or never signed a treaty with the zionists, but getting a boycott movement off the ground there has been challenging. it's as challenging as it is to get lebanese to boycott american and european products that give millions of dollars to the zionist state every year. lebanese seem to be incapable of stopping their obsessions with coca cola, nescafe, starbucks, mcdonalds.