10 brands you'll have to give up if you're boycotting Israel

Since 2005, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement (BDS) has called on the international community to pressure Israel economically as "a form of civil resistance to Israeli occupation, colonialism, and apartheid."

That would mean significant lifestyle changes for some consumers. Here are 10 brands that BDS supporters have urged others to boycott, not to mention thousands of other products that contain or use Israeli-developed technology, including iPhones, iPads, MacBooks, Skype, computer firewalls, and Microsoft XP.

1. Pampers

Mario Anzuoni / Reuters
Pampers diapers, a product distributed by Procter & Gamble, on sale at a California grocery store.

Procter & Gamble, which produces Pampers, is one of the largest clients of an Israeli company that supplies diaper products, Avgol Nonwoven Industries. P&G accounts for nearly half of the company's sales, according to the pro-boycott research group Who Profits. Avgol Nonwoven Industries runs a plant in the Barkan industrial complex, located near the West Bank settlement of Ariel.

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About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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