Dublin’s City Council is slated to vote on a resolution to boycott Hewlett Packard for doing business with Israel. We must ensure this aggressive measure fails!

The City Council of Dublin, Ireland, is slated to vote next month on a resolution to boycott Hewlett Packard over its ties with Israel as part of the city’s endorsement of the anti-Israel the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign.

The motion, put forward by Councillor John Lyons, falsely claims that “since its violent establishment in 1948 through the ethnic cleansing of more than half of the indigenous people of Palestine, the State of Israel has denied Palestinians their fundamental rights and has refused to comply with international law” while committing another broad array of crimes and atrocities.

The City Council “fully supports” BDS and “commits itself to discontinue all business contracts it has with Hewlett-Packard, both HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise for business and government services.”

Furthermore, according to the motion, HP provides and operates much of the technology infrastructure that Israel uses to “maintain its system of apartheid and settler colonialism over the Palestinian people,” and therefore should face sanctions by the City Council of Dublin.

These allegations are outrageous, and the anti-Israel motion will only generate more hatred and strife.

“Passing such one-sided anti-Israel resolutions will not benefit Palestinians, it will not bring peace closer,” Irish4Israel, a pro-Israel activist group, stated.

“It will, however, simply damage Dublin’s image as a tech hub and a place to invest,” the group noted. “It will make multinationals question their investment in Dublin.”

The motion will also damage Ireland’s image as a tourist destination. Many people across the globe do not share Ireland’s obsessive anti-Israel stance, especially in the US, Ireland’s largest tourist market, which holds favorable views of Israel.

We must urge Dublin’s Mayor Mícheál Mac Donncha to stop this motion and to take action to halt the spread of racist BDS in his local authority, for the benefit of all parties involved.

We must all send a message to Mac Donncha, making it clear that if this motion passes, we will no longer visit his city and will urge others as well not to travel to Dublin.