Scarlett Johansson is a heroine for standing up to Oxfam’s disgraceful anti-Israeli bullying

Scarlett Johansson doesn’t mean that much to me, probably because she tends to appear in the sort of film I don’t watch (the last one I can remember seeing her in was Lost in Translation ten years ago, which nearly bored me insensible). I’ve seen her in tons of TV and magazine adverts for "luxury" brands over the years, but I wasn’t aware of her role as an ambassador for Oxfam until I read today that she had given up her role with the charity after eight years because of her connection with the Israeli company SodaStream.

Apparently Oxfam objects to the fact that SodaStream has a factory in an Israeli West Bank settlement. Although the factory employs Palestinian workers on the same terms as Israelis, Oxfam feels that such businesses further “the poverty and denial of rights of the Palestinian community”.

Horseshit.

Only left-liberal “humanitarians” would accuse a company providing jobs for members of one of their pet victim groups of exacerbating that group’s poverty. Whatever the rights and wrongs of Jewish settlements on the West Bank, Oxfam's stated purpose is to alleviate poverty. How does demanding the closure of a factory provididing non-exploitative jobs further the charity's stated purpose? Does Oxfam seriously believe that, left to their own devices, the Palestinians would be better at creating jobs than Israeli companies? Of course not. As Oxfam's overriding aim is to alleviate poverty, it should be militating for an extension of Israeli economic activity wherever it would mean fewer Palestinians relying on hand-outs. But, then, many well-funded charities these days seem far more interested in pursuing irrelevant left-wing political agendas that in spending the money we give them on alleviating the forms of injustice and suffering they were set up to tackle.

I have no reason to disbelieve Ms Johansson’s official statement that she sees SodaStream as a company committed to “building a bridge to peace between Israel and Palestine, supporting neighbours working alongside each other, receiving equal pay, equal benefits and equal rights." But as SodaStream is a business whose main purpose is to turn a profit, leftist charity chiefs no doubt see it as intrinsically evil and exploitative – despite the fact that all charitable funding ultimately comes from the private sector (unless, of course, you count politically subversive funding from left-wing slave-states).

I have no idea whether the fact that Scarlett Johansson is half-Jewish (she has described herself as Jewish in the past) had anything to do with her split with Oxfam, but it seems unlikely, given that her relationship with the company is recent and that she doesn’t appear to have acted as an advocate for Israel or specifically Jewish causes in the past. Although she describes her politics as “independent”, she appears to be a standard-issue Hollywood liberal, having supported the presidential campaigns of both John Kerry and Barack Obama, so her refusal to toe the standard left-wing line on Israel strikes me as particularly admirable.

The other day I suggested it would be useful to have a website listing the political activities and pronouncement of actors and comedians so that conservatives could decide whether they really wanted to advance the careers of people who despise them. I also think it would be useful to have an online guide to charities which (a) listed how much of their funding is spent on employees’ salaries and (b) provided reliable evidence of the charities' covert (or overt) political agendas, so that compassionate conservatives won’t inadvertently be fooled into funding causes which are anathema to them: for instance, as a supporter of Israel, I won’t be spending another penny in Oxfam bookshops, just as I refuse to give money to the RSPCA due to of its leftist obsession with persecuting fox-hunters, or to Amnesty International because of its chronic bias against Western-backed countries.