This week marks the annual ExpoTech show, showing Palestinian high-tech ventures, being held simultaneously in Ramallah and Gaza City.
Here are some photos from last year's show in Gaza:
Look at all the starving children!
I found two of the exhibitors interesting, the Amassi Group and Jawal Sons:
Both of them prominently display the Hewlett-Packard logo in their booths.
HP, of course, is one of the targets of the BDS boycott. Apparently, in Gaza, being an HP partner is not considered a liability.
And this week happens to be the week that HP is specifically targeted for boycott by BDS!
There is nothing wrong with such an expo - in fact, I wish Gaza high tech companies all the success they can have, especially in finding the type of work that can be done remotely for clients worldwide, like coding mobile applications. It is a shortcoming of the PA and Gaza governments that such ventures have not been a key part of their economic policy. Instead, they skew their economies towards the hundreds of NGOs that bring tons of money that do not create any actual products.
Those very NGOs are the ones who are most against showing these types of images, because they can't raise money for Gaza when people see Gazan schoolkids attending a high-tech expo instead of playing in rubble that purposefully hasn't been cleared two years after a war.