What happened… and how you can help fight the anti-Israel hatred!
BDS seeks to take down Galilee olive oil business with Facebook campaign
By Tamara-Zieve
A small olive-oil business based in northern Israel has become one of the latest targets of anti-Israel activists and has spent the past week battling efforts to discredit its produce.
The campaign against the Yavne’el-based Galilee Green began on November 2, the centenary of the Balfour Declaration that paved the way for the establishment of the State of Israel.
The timing of the launch of the campaign by supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement was no coincidence – several online posts mentioned the milestone as a launchpad for their efforts to demonize the business.
Dozens of Facebook users have bombarded the Galilee Green Facebook page urging people not to buy their products, based on their claims that the products come from “stolen land” and “stolen olives” as well as far more virulent accusations.
Early days of Degania Aleph showing barren fields along the Jordan River
“Ironically, we work with Kibbutz Deganya Alef,” Galilee Green president and CEO Rabbi Shmuel Veffer told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. “The land the trees are on was purchased from the Ottoman Turks before WWI and the Balfour Declaration.
Our offices are in Yavne’el on land purchased by Baron Rothschild from the Turks and Yavne’el was founded in 1901. The land here and at Deganya was rocky and barren of trees.”
Veffer who founded the company is an immigrant from Toronto, Canada.
The first bombardment of messages, many in the form of one-star reviews, succeeded in bringing Galilee Green’s 5-star rating down to 3-stars.
But loyal customers promptly fought back with posting glowing 5-star reviews on the page, bringing the rating back up to 4-stars as of Thursday afternoon.
Galilee Green and its supporters have been reporting certain posts to Facebook, based on the social media giant’s rules against harassment, hate speech and threats. Facebook has removed some of the posts and responded to Galilee Green with a form letter outlining procedures of blocking people from the page and adjusting privacy settings. But the amount Facebook has removed is only a small portion of those posted, and thus the most effective countermeasure has been the groundswell of positive reviews issued in response to the BDS campaign.
“My grandfather’s flower shop in Holland had a Jewish star and Jude painted on his window in an attempt by the antisemites to shut down his business,” Veffer remarked. “In the end, they survived by hiding for three years. After the Nazis were defeated, they came out of hiding with their six children and reopened the flower shop. Now it’s my turn to have the haters trying to destroy my business, simply because I’m Jewish.”
Veffer said he has received support from across the globe, including from Rena Nickerson, general manager of SodaStream Canada – a company that was famously targeted by BDS over its principal manufacturing facility, which used to be located in Mishor Adumim in the West Bank.
“This olive oil company, Galilee Green, exemplifies grace under pressure,” Nickerson wrote in a Facebook post. “Please help them in their fight against antisemitism as they are experiencing a new wave of attacks now. You can help by reporting reviews you find to be hateful and untruthful to FB.”
this article originally appeared at the JPOST
What you can do to help us at Galilee Green:
Facebook will not allow us to delete reviews. But there are two ways to respond…
- Please do not engage with the hateful comments with your own comments. That is what they want!
- Simply Click on the three dots “…” at the top right of the offensive review and “Report” it to Facebook. If they get enough complaints, they will potentially remove it and ban the user.
- If you haven’t already, make your own review of our company, and add your own positive comments like this one
If we get a few hundred positive reviews from you, then it will drown out the negative reviews and bring our average rating back up to where it was.
Click here now to LIKE our page and WRITE your own review
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