Hillel Manne, founder and owner of Beit El Winery in the West Bank Israeli settlement of Beit El, displays the season’s first leaves in his vineyard on March 26, 2014. Mr. Manne says his 2012 vintages have completely sold out.Heidi Levine/The Globe and Mail
Not every Israeli settler is worried about the growing boycott campaign being waged against Israel and targeting, in particular, the products of its controversial communities in the West Bank.
Take Hillel Manne, founder of the tiny Beit El Winery, a boutique operation on the rocky hillside where Jacob, in the Bible's Book of Genesis, is said to have dreamed of a ladder to heaven. The 56-year-old Mr. Manne, a native of Palo Alto, Calif., readily admits that the so-called Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (or BDS) campaign against Israel is having a significant effect on the export of his wines. But not the one you might imagine.
"It's driving my sales up," he says with a sly smile. "I couldn't be happier."
While the European Union is finalizing requirements for its retailers to specify the origin of products imported from Israeli settlements – with a view to discouraging their purchase – and the United Nations Human Rights Council is voting on resolutions that would encourage countries to boycott Israeli and foreign companies that operate in West Bank settlements, Mr. Manne says he's reaping the benefits.
"The EU wants to prohibit sales of my wine," he says. "So what." For every potential sale that is lost in Europe, several new customers elsewhere are stepping forward to buy his product. "There's a whole new market out there of people who want my wine because it's grown in the yeshuv [settlement]," he says.
Call it the counter-BDS movement, made up of supporters of Israel who think the sanctions campaign is a form of anti-Semitism. "How else can you explain it?" asks Mr. Manne, who founded the winery in 1999, went through several economically fallow years, before his bumper 2012 crop.
Between its Cabernet Sauvignon and Caringnon varieties, Beit El produced about 10,000 bottles of wine from the 2012 crop. More than 90 per cent, Mr. Manne said, were exported to the United States, in particular to New York City, where the demand for Kosher wines is strong and for settlement Kosher wines stronger still.
While some West Bank wineries hide behind misleading labels, with names such as "Jerusalem Heights" (a wine produced in the settlement of Kiryat Arba from grapes grown in the Hebron Hills), or a place of origin described as "Israel," Mr. Manne is completely up front, labelling his product simply Beit El.
The settlements, illegal under international law, house about half a million Israelis (when you include the 200,000 or so who live within the municipal boundaries of modern-day Jerusalem but on land that was captured from Jordan in 1967).
Manufacturing within the settlements is often only for domestic Israeli consumption, but there are some significant goods for exports. These including Ahava beauty products, made from Dead Sea minerals and mud, and the SodaStream line of carbonated beverage makers, recently made famous by a Super Bowl ad that featured actress Scarlett Johansson.
The ad ended up drawing attention to the fact that SodaStream's main base of operation is outside the West Bank settlement of Maale Adumim, about 35 km from Beit El.
Of course sanctions campaigns also can benefit Israel in other ways. If a group of U.S. senators has its way, punitive measures to be taken against Russia for its takeover of Crimea will include a bar to Moscow sending a team to the World Cup in Brazil this summer. In the event this happens, the country that finished third in Group F in World Cup qualifying – behind Russia and Portugal – would take its place. That country would be none other than Israel.