Jerusalem, Europe Brief News – Spanish fashion giant Zara has been under fire over the past week amid calls for boycott.
The boycott campaign came after the company’s local franchise head hosted the Israeli extreme-right leader Itamar Ben-Gvir for a campaign event.
Recent opinion polls suggest Ben-Gvir has been gaining strength ahead of the November 1 election, which could see his nationalist alliance emerge as the third-largest bloc in parliament.
His meeting with Joey Schwebel, chair of Zara’s Israel franchisee Trimera, sparked a backlash after local media reported it last week, with some people burning Zara items and pushing for a boycott.
Fayez Abu Souhaiban, mayor of Rahat, an Arab-majority town in southern Israel, also slammed Zara in a video circulated on social media.
“We have to burn these clothes and I call on fellow citizens to boycott this company,” he further said, as he set a Zara item ablaze.
Ben-Gvir, who lives in a settlement in the occupied West Bank, regularly turns up at hotspots in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has become infamous for his anti-Arab rhetoric and racist statements.
Itamar Ben-Gvir is head of the ultra-nationalist Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) faction running in Israel’s legislative elections next month.
He recently pulled out a gun on residents of the Palestinian neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah in occupied East Jerusalem and has praised Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli settler who massacred 29 Palestinians at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in 1994. He told officers in the area: “If they are throwing stones. Shoot them.”
Ben-Gvir has previously called for disloyal politicians to be deported from Israel, along with Palestinians who throw stones and Molotov cocktails at police, openly saying he will “promote the Deportation Law”.
