February 21, 2012
New boycott called over Israeli chocolate bars
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Photo by André Karwath
The leaders of Israel’s cottage cheese boycott are calling for a new boycott over the high price of chocolate bars.
The calls came earlier this week after an Israeli living in the United States posted a photo on Facebook of a receipt from a New Jersey supermarket showing that the popular Israeli chocolate bar Pesek Zman is being sold for one-third of its cost in Israel. Other chocolate bars manufactured by the Elite company also are being sold at similarly low prices abroad, according to reports.
Elite is owned by the Israeli conglomerate the Strauss Group, which was hit hard by the boycott of cottage cheese and other dairy products this summer as part of the social justice protests and eventually dropped its prices.
Boycott organizers have called for a month-long boycott of Strauss-Elite chocolate bars to begin on March 1, just before the chocolate-intensive Purim holiday begins on the evening of March 7.
Strauss said in a statement that it cannot control the price that retailers place on their products, and said it believed that the prices were lower in Jewish communities in the United States in advance of Purim. It also named supermarkets in Israel that sell its chocolate at cut-rate prices.
