Egypt's Al Ahram has an op-ed about how high tech companies in Israel are supposedly trying to marginalize Arabs.
The author, Asim Abdel Khalek, says, "In the Negev desert, the giant Cisco company operates and has two outlets in the two Palestinian towns of Hurra and Ar'arat, working with IBM as part of Israel's plan to settle Jews and deport the Palestinian Bedouins. "
Cisco (and IBM) are cooperating with Israel to deport Arabs from the Negev? Where did it get this information from?
From the "Who Profits?" BDS organization. And their description of Cisco's activities in Israel and in Palestinian areas shows that every fact - even heavy investment in training and hiring Israeli Arabs and Palestinians - can be twisted to fit the BDS agenda.
"Who Profits" writes about Cisco:
In the Naqab, where ten Cisco technology equipped hubs are planned, two are located in Palestinian towns – one in Hura and the other in Ar’arat al-Naqab (two out of seven Palestinian Bedouin towns in the Naqab).[10] These hubs form part of the Israeli government’s industrialisation and resettlement plan which strives to create jobs in the Naqab, in the hope of drawing Jewish Israelis to settle in the region, while concentrating its Palestinian communities into ghettoized residential areas.
First of all these aren't Cisco centers, but Israeli tech hubs that use Cisco equipment.
And where do they get the idea that these hubs are ways to expel the Bedouin from the Negev?
They just made that up.
After all, Israel isn't trying to kick the Bedouin out of the Negev. They want them to live in communities that have infrastructure, unlike the slapdash and illegal communities that Arabs build all over the Negev, but Israel does not want unemployed Negev Arabs - on the contrary, Israel invests huge sums in their welfare.
This other section of the Who Profits site shows how insane their hate is, and how eager the BDSers are to throw Palestinians under the bus for their own goals:
In 2008, Cisco signed a collaborative deal with the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, for the investment of 10 million USD for the development of the Palestinian hi-tech sector. The investment was managed by Gay Hetzroni, then the manager of the software development department at Cisco-Israel.The deal involved outsourcing work to Palestinian engineers and technicians, led by Cisco-Israel. This Cisco project was a milestone in setting a trend in the outsourcing of work to a skilled, yet comparatively cheap Palestinian workforce by Israeli and Israeli intermediaries of international companies. Palestinian workers are paid well below the wages of an Israeli hi-tech worker (2500 and 4000 USD respectively). Since Cisco’s deal in 2008, the Israeli subsidiaries of Intel, Microsoft and Mellanox, have also outsourced work to Palestinian technicians. This outsourcing process reduces production costs through exploitation, and entrenches the dependency of Palestinian economic development on the economic and political interests of the occupying power.
According to the BDSers, any investment in Palestinian high tech is bad, because they get paid less than Israelis do, so it is exploitation.
Which means that every high tech company on Earth that outsources jobs to India or Indonesia or China is exploiting their workers - even though those jobs pay far higher than the average salary in those places.
Cisco invested tens of millions into training and growing the Palestinian high tech sector, and that investment helped bring other companies into the West Bank, along with thousands of jobs. As Forbes wrote in 2013:
Buoyed by training, investment or partnerships from Israelis or Israeli subsidiaries of American companies, more than 300 Palestinian technology firms now employ 4,500 people, FORBES estimates, up from just 23 firms in the six-year period leading up to 2000. More are on the way: There's at least $100 million in venture cash from Israeli or Western sources either looking for deals or recently put to work in Palestinian or Israeli Arab startups (with the latter community, representing one-fifth of the country's citizenry, increasingly agitating to get in on the action). Meanwhile, Chambers and his peers at U.S. technology giants have pushed their Israeli subsidiaries to outsource research and development projects to Palestinian startups or to hire local Arabs.
... a $50 million fund called Al Bawader (Arabic for "early signs") [is] earmarked solely for investments in Israel's Arab community. The funding is unlike anything before seen in the Middle East. The Israeli government has put money into Al Bawader, as have individual Israeli Jews, Israeli-Arabs--and Palestinians.More Palestinians, and more Israeli Arabs, are getting more jobs that pay more money.
But BDS is against this.
This shows again that the BDS movement does not give a damn about Palestinians.
