Some people might think he’s living in a bubble, but Daniel Birnbaum, chief executive of Israeli fizzy drinks maker SodaStream, said this week he wants to hire 200 Syrian refugees to work in his new factory.
Birnbaum has even enlisted the help of the nearby Bedouin town, Rahat, where Mayor Talal al-Krenawi said he’d be happy to host the refugees and their families. The Bedouins, a Muslim minority in Israel, speak Arabic as their first language, so the Syrians would fit right in.
The problem with Birnbaum’s plan is that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already said there is no way for Israel to accommodate refugees from Syria, which shares a border with Israel in the north. Israel, a predominantly Jewish country, is too small and not demographically suited for the refugees, he said recently.
Israel is already engaged in trying to find a solution for thousands of Eritrean and Sudanese refugees who arrived illegally over the past decade via Egypt. The Israeli government has been severely criticized for undertaking methods such as paying them to leave and long-term incarceration.
“Israel is not indifferent to the human tragedy of the refugees from Syria and Africa,” said Netanyahu on Sept. 6. “We have already devotedly cared for approximately 1,000 wounded people from the fighting in Syria. But Israel is a small country, a very small country, that lacks demographic and geographic depth.”
Then Netanyahu announced that Israel had already started building a fence on its eastern border with Jordan so the country will not “be flooded with illegal migrants and terrorists.”
Various politicians and media commentators urged the prime minister to reconsider. Opposition leader Isaac Herzog said Israel should follow the lead of some European countries and take in refugees from Syria.
Jews should “not remain indifferent to hundreds of thousands of refugees,” Herzog said.
A joint statement released this week by SodaStream and Rahat’s saying they could together absorb up to 1,000 Syrians has raised the debate again and got Israelis asking whether it might still be possible to offer refuge to those fleeing the civil war next door. Although it is not clear whether Syrian nationals, whose country has been at war with Israel for decades, would want to relocate here.
“As the son of a Holocaust survivor, I refuse to stand by and observe this human tragedy unfold right across the border in Syria,” said Birnbaum in the statement.
In an interview with the Israeli financial newspaper Calcalist, Birnbaum said his goal was to put pressure on the Israeli government to take in refugees.
The beverage maker, who gained attention last year by hiring Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson for a Super Bowl ad, sees his factory an island of co-existence in the Middle East, where Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze work together to make the home-carbonation machines.
However, SodaStream, which opened its new facility in southern Israel earlier this year, has been subjected to a hardened campaign by pro-Palestinian activists because its original plant was located in a West Bank Israeli settlement. Leaders of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction movement claim the company’s withdrawal from the West Bank is a big win for the Palestinian cause.
The company says the move was planned anyway and in a recent interview with The Washington Post, Birnbaum said the boycott had robbed Palestinians of good paying jobs. Before the move, SodaStream employed 600 Palestinians but only 130 have been able to relocate to the new factory because of Israeli government restrictions on permits and freedom of movement for Palestinians.
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