By the time Scarlett Johansson’s critically unacclaimed Super Bowl commercial for SodaStream finally aired Sunday night, both supporters and critics of Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank had pronounced themselves satisfied with the new attention the actress’s endorsement brought to the company’s factory in a Jewish settlement outside Jerusalem.
During the game itself, there was an exchange of memes online between bloggers working for a pro-Israel group in Washington and contributors to The Electronic Intifada, a site founded by a Palestinian-American in Chicago.
Watching from Israel — where political leaders denounced Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday for just mentioning the prospect of a widening economic boycott against the nation should peace talks stall once again — the journalist Noam Sheizaf observed that praise for the actress in the local press seemed to be balanced out by reports in the global media welcomed by anti-occupation activists.
“Scarlett for Israel” was the headline in Yedioth Ahronoth, whose Friday edition is the most widely read paper in Israel. The editors placed the story on page 1, above the fold. International coverage of the affair, however, told a slightly different story, repeatedly referring to the settlements as illegal and highlighting the damage to Johansson’s image.
Israel’s foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, who lives in a settlement himself, hailed the actress for her outspoken defense of the SodaStream plant, and her decision to cut ties with Oxfam, an antipoverty group she represented until last week, which objects to “the factory’s location in an illegal settlement built on the land and resources of Palestinian communities.” Despite the criticism from Oxfam, and pressure from a Palestinian-led movement to boycott all Israeli companies, not just those operating in settlements, Ms. Johansson “took a clearly principled stand against those who disguise their classic anti-Semitism under false pretenses,” Mr. Lieberman told Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s most popular newspaper. “Our Oscar goes to Scarlett!” he added.
A pro-Israel group’s online campaign to thank Ms. Johansson for “for standing up for Israel” — illustrated by a difficult to parse image of the actress sharing a soda with the Israeli prime minister and the Palestinian president — similarly suggested that opposition to settlements is motivated only by “anti-Israel hate” and SodaStream is a shining example of cooperation between the two communities.
However, claims that only anti-Semitism can explain opposition to trade with Jewish settlements built on West Bank land under military occupation since 1967 would seem to be undercut by the small but vocal community of Jews in Israel and the United States who support that sort of narrowly targeted boycott. Just after the SodaStream commercial was broadcast, the American writer Peter Beinart — who has called on supporters of Israel to boycott the settlements before the Israeli presence in the West Bank expands so far as to make a two-state solution impossible — retweeted critical comments from Jewish and Palestinian writers who contributed to his “Open Zion” blog.
While it is difficult to say if many American football fans were even aware of the controversy over the ad, at least one American news organization, The Christian Broadcasting Network, ran a report Monday that presented the uproar in terms that exactly echoed the views of SodaStream’s chief executive, Daniel Birnbaum.
The C.B.N. report was introduced as a look at “how a growing boycott of Israel is affecting businesses that actually help Palestinians,” and incorrectly conflated Oxfam’s call for an end to trade with Israeli companies based in settlements with the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, known as B.D.S., which encourages a ban on all trade with Israel. After interviewing several Palestinian workers who expressed gratitude for their jobs in the factory, the network’s correspondent reported that, in the end, Ms. Johansson “stood with SodaStream’s Palestinian workers and resigned from Oxfam.”
Mr. Sheizaf, the Israeli journalist, dismissed as “Orwellian Newspeak” the argument that the benefits reaped by the few Palestinians allowed in to the settlement to work for SodaStream, somehow outweighed the damage to Palestinian society as a whole from the occupation, and the network of Israeli-only towns crisscrossing the West Bank that Palestinians are excluded from and nearly encircled by. He added:
In defending SodaStream, and later Johansson, there was much talk about the equal benefits Palestinian workers in the factory receive. If the factory was to suffer, the logic goes, those Palestinians will be the first to get hurt. I hope nobody who makes this argument seriously believes that equality exists when one party is completely dependent on the other’s good will. When a worker is deprived of political representation and can find himself in a military court following any controversy or problem, is he really equal? Does he get his freedom to travel along with his paycheck? His right to due process?