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IN RECENT weeks, Brighton has become the focus of Palestinian boycott activity, with demonstrators noisily picketing the clinical Ecostream store on the city’s main thoroughfare, Western Road. The store specialises in products made by the Nasdaq-quoted firm SodaStream that has revived a centuryold industry of supplying households with refillable and exchangeable C02 cartridges. These are marketed as an environmentally-friendly alternative to the fizzy drinks sold by bottling giants Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.
Brighton has a history of natural friendly start-ups. The first of the late Anita Roddick’s Body Shop stores was launched in the fashionable coastal town, so it might appear exactly the right place for Ecostream to launch in Britain. “Brighton Pavilion” is the only parliamentary constituency in Britain with a Green Party MP, Caroline Lucas, and the town is known for its interest in alternative life-styles.
SodaStream markets itself as the ecologically-friendly contender in the carbonated drinks market. Despite the solidly green credentials, its first free-standing British store finds itself under siege.
The group’s chief executive, Daniel Birnbaum is an enthusiastic supporter of the green cause. “Transportation for the carbonated drinks in the world utilises 100 million barrels of oil every year,” he told the Wall Street Journal recently. “Coke and Pepsi will have to face the reality that their business model cannot be preserved for ever. The world is changing and we are going to call it out,” he says defiantly.
Ecostream has been targeted because one of parent SodaStream’s 13 manufacturing plants is located in the West Bank community of Mishor Adumin. What the Brighton protesters choose to ignore is that most of the 500-strong workforce at the plant are Palestinian, including the general manager.
Moreover, the average wage paid is between 1200 and 1500 per month, a figure six times that of wages paid elsewhere in the territories. So far, from being a source of repression, SodaStream is a model of Israeli-Palestinian economic partnership and just the kind of enterprise needed if a two-state solution to the Middle-East is ever to be forged.
SodaStream is a company with a rich British history. The company was founded by gin distiller Guy Gilbey in 1903 and in its early years, it was the