Norwegian youth group YMCA-YWCA boycotts Israel

Norway’s Young Men and Women’s Christian Association (YMCA-YWCA) has joined the growing international boycott campaign against Israel.

Falling in line with Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel, the group said in a statement published on its Norwegian-language website last week that it “encourages broad economic boycott of goods and services from Israel and Israeli settlements.”

The organization said its doing so was meant to pressure the Israeli regime to “follow up on UN resolutions and end the illegal occupation of Palestine.”

The YMCA-YWCA wrote that it had decided to embrace the BDS “because a long series of UN resolutions and negotiations for decades have not yielded results.”

“We believe it is now appropriate to initiate an economic boycott of Israel to put increased pressure on the Israeli authorities.”

Last month, US Secretary of State John Kerry pointed to “an increasing de-legitimization” campaign building up against Israel internationally and “talk of boycotts” if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not end.

In February, a major Dutch pension fund, PGGM, which is one of the world’s largest pension asset managers, said it would divest from five Israeli banks it says are involved in financing construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

In January, two of Europe’s largest banks, Nordea Bank of Sweden and Danske Bank of Denmark, announced they would terminate all joint operations with Israeli banks which deal with the settlements that Israel is building in the occupied West Bank.