Stephanie Westbrook

Popular Sodastream products directly benefit the largest Israeli settlement colony in the occupied West Bank. Meanwhile the company exploits Palestinian factory workers and attempts to “greenwash” its profit from Israel’s occupation.

Palestine solidarity activists in Milan held vibrant protests against an Israeli propaganda festival in the city center last month, highlighting Italian complicity with the Israeli occupation.

Earlier this month in Montpellier, France, more than a hundred activists from nine countries gathered for the first ever European Forum Against Agrexco for two full days of workshops aimed at strengthening the boycott campaign against the Israeli agricultural export giant.

Outside the Washington Convention Center, together with activists from CodePink, Veterans for Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Avaaz, Jewish Voice for Peace and the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, we tried to bring a little reality to the AIPAC policy conference bubble. We carried signs and banners calling for respect for international law and human rights, an end to the siege of Gaza, Israeli apartheid and US taxpayer funding of war crimes.

Gaza’s landscape is dotted with piles of rubble of bombed out buildings, the twisted iron and aluminum of destroyed factories, once green fields reduced to sand and dirt by Israeli tanks, apartments with two-meter holes in the walls and toppled minarets of mosques turned to ruins. “But as devastating as bearing witness to the destruction was, it was the absurdities of the total blockade of Gaza imposed by Israel and Egypt that really affected me,” writes Stephanie Westbrook upon returning from Gaza.