BDZ Araba (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) is taking action to make visible the complicity of six neighborhood supermarkets in Vitoria-Gasteiz with apartheid in Israel. In this action, the Israeli packages of dates and peanuts that these establishments sell to people with stickers inscribed in “Palestine askatu/Boikot Israel” are marked.

Israeli settlers plant palm trees to the Palestinians in the occupied territories. The money they earn from the export of dates allows them to remain settled in these usurped territories. In 2023, Spain imported 14 million kg of fresh or dried dates for EUR 40 million, according to information from the database of the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism, DataComex. As a result of this income, Israel will be able to prolong the siege to Gaza.

As stated in the sociology blog of the food system, “the dates of Israel pose not only a serious ethical but also legal problem. Indeed, the free trade agreement between the European Union and Israel makes it possible to remove tariffs on products that do not come from settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. “Origin of Ametller: As the report says, “No more dates in Israel”, “if settlements are illegal, why is their trade legal?” Therefore, the authorities should not accept that dates imported from Israel but planted on occupied lands should be duty-free.”

On the other hand, in addition to doing business, Israel intends to attack the Palestinian food system by occupying Palestinian lands, cannot work and has food sovereignty, and is hungry, because it is another strategy of the Zionist project. “The Israeli occupation has led to hunger in the Gaza Strip […] Malnutrition has killed dozens of children and will be many more. Palestinian activist Yasmeen El Hasan, representative of the NGO Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), denounced in his interview this morning.

For all these reasons, a measure not to be complicit in this wheel, which is available to anyone, which is another piece of the Israeli genocidal gear, is not to buy or boycott the dates and peanuts of this State and to boycott the supermarkets that sell, accomplices.

Hunger as a war of arms

The Israeli colonial regime has killed over 50,000 people in Palestine in the last year, according to official data from the White House. This massacre has been a major step in the history of the ethnic cleansing of the population of a century. However, several studies, including the British medical journal The Lancet, have found that this figure could exceed EUR 200,000. They have explained that those who have been identified and accepted must be joined by those who are dying as a result of hunger. And that is that the population is being starved into the occupation regime.

In short, while Israel uses hunger as a weapon of war against the Palestinian population, it sells its agricultural products around the world. These foods are produced mainly in the occupied territories, specifically in the Jordan River Valley, which is the most fertile land in the region. This agribusiness is one of the main supports of the Israeli economy and helps to stabilize the position of the colonial regime in this region.