Norwegian YMCA Embraces Boycott Israel Policy
Pro-Palestinians activists demonstrate in 2010. Image by Getty Images
Norway’s Young Men and Women’s Christian Association aligned itself with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, or BDS.
The Norwegian YMCA-YWCA “encourages broad economic boycott of goods and services from Israel and Israeli settlements to pressure the Israeli government to follow up on U.N. resolutions and end the illegal occupation of Palestine,” the organization wrote in a statement published on its Norwegian-language website last week.
With 30,000 members in over 500 different chapters and affiliated Scouts groups, the Norwegian YMCA-YWCA — or KFUK-KFUM in its Norwegian acronym — is among the country’s largest and oldest youth groups.
Conrad Myrland, director of Norway’s With Israel for Peace group, or MIFF, told the Vart Land daily that he considers the youth organization’s move “too weak to be considered tragic. Boycott of Israel is stupid and immoral independently of the support it has from YMCA-YWCA,” he said.
“The only result is that YMCA-YWCA now supports boycotting the only democracy in the Middle East,” Myrland said. “I encourage all individuals and churches to withdraw their support of YMCA-YWCA until the immoral boycott action is abandoned.”
On its website, Norway’s YMCA-YWCA wrote that the organization decided to embrace BDS “because a long series of U.N. 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.”
The Forward is free to read but not free to produce
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.
This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
