Boycotts

Welcome to The Punch’s Biggest Moments of 2011. Each day until the Friday before Christmas, we’ll be counting the events which marked 2011. Our list contains moments from politics, popular culture, tragedy, sport and more. Some are frivolous. Others are deadly serious. These are the moments which had us talking in 2011. More to the point, they’re the moments that had YOU talking.

What happened
Fiona Byrne, the mayor of Marrickville in inner Sydney, backed a motion to support the international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel. This basically meant that no Israeli products would be sold within the boundaries of Marrickville Council. Tough luck, bagel-lovers. Good news for Vietnamese pork roll sellers.

What happened next
All hell broke loose. Some argued that councils should stick to local services like rubbish collection. Others pointed out that in a region which has nearly 200 ethnicities living cheek to jowl, there were plenty of evil repressive regimes much more worthy of attention than a democratic state fighting for its right to exist – even considering the ongoing claims for Palestinian statehood.

Continue reading "Biggest moments of 2011 #23 Marrickville invades Israel" »

So Archbishop Desmond Tutu has congratulated the Marrickville Council for their temporary boycott of Israeli products. But living a Zionist-free life is actually much harder than most people probably think. This fact finally dawned on the Council earlier this year, when they were forced to concede that their attempt to boycott Israel as part of the global Boycott, Divestments and Sanctions campaign was “impractical and untenable.”

Yet last week in the Federal Parliament, the Labor Party watered down a motion moved in the House of Representatives by Julie Bishop on the issue, voting to remove the condemnation of Marrickville Council contained in the original motion.

The reasoning behind Labor’s refusal to condemn Marrickville Council remains opaque. Perhaps some Labor MPs are sympathetic to the goal of removing Zionism in all its forms from their lives, or perhaps they are just afraid to incur the wrath of their Greens allies, some of whom - including Marrickville Mayor Fiona Byrne - still advocate for “in-principle” support of the boycott.

Continue reading "Living Zionist-free is Tutu hard" »

Last night at a meeting of the Marrickville Council, the council voted eight to four to not pursue its boycott of Israel.

Marrickville Council’s abortive attempt to implement the Global Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (GBDS) campaign against Israel in Sydney’s Inner West should be a wake-up call. The moment to turn this objectionable campaign around should not be lost, else we will see more loopy home-grown forays into foreign policy. While this campaign may have been temporarily halted at a municipal level, it has gained considerable ground within Australia’s unions.

In moving her motion at Marrickville Council, Greens Councillor, Cathy Peters noted that the BDS campaign had the support of the Victorian Trades Hall Council, the South Coast Labour Council, and various state branches of the ASU, Teachers’ Union, LHMWU, CFMEU and MUA. In fact this is only half the list.

Continue reading "BDS BS: Labor’s infected and the Greens are gangrenous" »

Kosher pickle lovers, rest easy. Sydney’s Marrickville Council has backed down overnight from its plan to boycott all things Israeli.

This is a win both for common sense, and for anyone who enjoys the delicious, sour, garlicky, Israeli Eskal pickles pictured above, which will continue to be available for purchase on the shelves of Marrickville Woolworths, as they have been for a decade or more.

Despite butchering her run at state parliament, not to mention the credibility of both the Greens and her own council over the Israel boycott, Marrickville Mayor Fiona Byrne went down swinging in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, with a bizarre, longwinded justification of her council’s right, nay civic duty, to embroil itself in matters beyond garbage collection.

Continue reading "Eskalating pressure gets council out of a pickle" »