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Got milk? Settler urge boycott, and dairy industry threatens revenge.
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| By Associated Press November 27, 2004 |
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Israeli cattle farmers and the country's biggest dairy have locked horns with Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip after the dairy's CEO described Israel's control of those areas as "a cancer."
The dispute began after Arik Reichman, chief executive of the Tnuva company, said in a recent interview that Israel must withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza for its own good, according to media reports Friday.
"Our control of the territories is like a malignant cancer in the heart of the nation," Reichman reportedly told the Y-Net news Web site. "There will be no healthy society without disengagement from the cancer of occupation."
Angry settler leaders quickly called for a boycott of Tnuva, sparking a quick backlash.
Israel's collective farms, which supply the bulk of the company's milk, warned the settlers that a boycott could boomerang on them.
"In their campaign against Tnuva the settlers have started a process of disengagement from the state of Israel," according to a kibbutz movement statement quoted by The Jerusalem Post. "Someone who wants to boycott someone else who does not think as they do will quickly discover that the rest of Israel is boycotting him."
Food producers belonging to the Israeli Industrialists' Association say that if the settlers do not drop their boycott by Sunday its members -- Israel's biggest foodmakers as well as the local franchise holder for Coca Cola -- will weigh suspending deliveries of their products to the settlements, the daily Maariv reported.
Attempts to arrange a truce meeting between settler leaders and Tnuva executives had so far failed, with the settlers demanded a retraction from Reichman as a precondition for talks, Maariv reported.
Neither Tnuva nor the settlers' organization could be reached for comment Friday, the start of the Jewish sabbath.
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