While officially the PA is only boycotting "settlement" products, there have been more public calls for Palestinian Arabs to boycott all Israeli goods.
Ma'an Arabic reports that a boycott organization was at a Nablus shopping area today, exhorting people not to buy Israeli products.
They said that every shekel that goes to the Israeli economy goes towards a bulldozer to destroy an Arab house or a bullet to kill an Arab child.
More interestingly, the article mentioned "public anger" at Arabs who actually shop in shopping malls of the settlements. This sounds a lot like the 1930s Arab boycott - will these activists start to threaten those who actually want to buy Israeli goods?
It also mentioned calls for Palestinian Arab authorities "to intensify their efforts to curb the invasion of Israeli goods and settlement goods to our markets to Palestine, because of the lack of border crossings between the Palestinian communities and settlements."
(Which sounds like the relationship between Jews and Arabs who live near each other in the West Bank is not so bad, if they regularly trade goods and shop. That almost sounds like....peace! But that is crazy talk, because we all know that peace is what the leaders say it is, not how ordinary people act.
(One Israeli in the West Bank once told me that Jews in his town used to regularly go to Nablus for their shopping and banking before the first intifada, because it was closer than Jerusalem and convenient. Post Oslo, of course, such ideas are heresy to the people who are invested in the "peace process.")
Anyway, the article ends off with the claim that many Palestinian Arab housewives are not ensuring that their homes are not polluted with any Israeli food, drink or cleaning products. How long before it gets expanded to include "Jewish" and "Zionist" products like Pepsi?
