The Settlement Boycott Pages


• The list of products to boycott
• How Ariga was cyberterrorized as a result of publishing this list
• Letters to Ariga reacting to the publication of the list
• Frequently Asked Questions about the boycott

October 28 1997

Ariga was e-bombed in the last 24 hours, meaning hundreds of e-mails arrived at Ariga -- mostly as a result of fraudulent subscriptions to listservs, but also as a result of what appears to be a concerted (meaning unified) effort to protest Ariga's publication of the Gush Shalom Jewish Settlement Product Boycott List.

Two weeks ago Ariga reposted the Gush Shalom Boycott list. Gush Shalom has been in favor of partition of the Land of Israel and the establishment of a Palestinian state since 1968. The Zionist Movement was in favor of it from 1939 to 1967. But in 1967 something weird happened. A three-hour air war was called a six day war as if god flew the jets and died in Rafiah or on the golan. By the end of 1968, a combination of us pressure to preserve Hussein in Jordan and a messianic lunacy that broke out through a wide spectrum of the Israeli and public led to a national blindness to the fact Jewish national self-liberation had not only given birth to Palestinian national self-liberation, but that the Jewish state, meaning one with a Jewish democracy and majority, could not remain a democracy if it denied the Palestinians a state.

Like Shabtai Zvi and others who claimed absolute truth totally at odds with the traditions of Judaism -- but this time with the ostensible backing of a political/military establishment which originally proposed helping the Palestinians make a state that breaks away from Jordan, but, as I said, under Nixon and Kissinger, Ike rabin decided for the Jordanian option, delaying Palestinian statehood nearly thirty years -- Gush Emunim became a monster that swallowed half the population. Moshe Levinger is the policy-setter of israel, for if he wasn't he'd be in jail.

But that's my side of the argument. From the side against publishing the list, Ariga received close to fifty e-mails written with many of the same elements in the text. Some seemed to have agreed to a formula that said they'd be sure to buy those products and only wished me to get the punishment god promises to all those who persecute the Jews. Others seemed to say the following: because i love the jewish people so much, I hate you.

I tried to answer mostly something along the lines of "thanks for your thoughtful, well thought-out, reasonable, sincere, caring, indeed loving response."

Those who used the n-word, were politely told that once internet correspondence begins referring to the nazis, I check out of the dialogue.

And those who said thanks for the list, because now they'll buy those products were told "it's a free world," and that I had no problem with that. It's their decision.

But then Ariga was hit by the e-bombs. Someone using a listserv at the University of Arkansas bombarded listservs with phony subscriptions for rbr@ariga.com under the name frederick williamsburg. email addresses of all sorts ending with the domain "ariga.com" were sent in as subscribers to these lists. More than a hundred automated responses came in, including the "spoofing message" that listserv puts out when someone tries to subscribe more than fifty times in an hour to a list.

In short, I was terrified. Was my entire network going to collapse? Would my email ever work again? Was two years worth of work about to go down the drain?

Many of the people writing in asked that same question of me -- maybe my efforts would harm some poor child of a settler (recently unemployed because the Netanyahu administration's bullying of the arabs -- let alone the leftists, the americans, europeans, all except the micronesians -- had destroyed the tourism trade (but not, apparently, the tefilin for export trade); to this I responded simply that for more than 20 years, the settlers have had cheap mortgages, tax-free conditions (because they live outside the state of israel) and received land and infrastructure for free, precisely because of a wrong headed policy that was about preventing the palestinians from having a state.

I cannot cry for any of the settlers. I warned them in 1972, when I turned down an offer to get free housing in Yamit because I understood israel would one day have to give it back to the Egyptians (and I wanted Israel to do so, in exchange for peace with the Egyptians.)

Others suggested merely that i rejoin saddam, that i was a "bustard" that i should burn in hell, don't ask. lots of stuff. Mostly, however, it was people declaring war on me, when my point back to them was that in a democracy, people don't threaten war against one another. They use political tools, such as boycotts, to get their point across. Personally, the last time I lived in America for any substantial length of time, people were still boycotting grapes and lettuce because of the farm workers.

So the question is as follows: How does one explain thee apparent insistence by the Jewish gene to repeat the Jewish wars of the turn of the millennium 2,000 years ago, when the zealots took over, and decided that since god was on their side, they could beat the empire, defeat the world, run things their way, no matter what? For those who don't know what i'm talking about, check your library's Josephus Flavius -- and for those who do know, puh-lease, don't tell me he was a traitor to the Jews. All he did was tell the story of what happened here at the time.

Today's Situation || Yesterday's Situation