Bringing fair trade business to a little town called Bethlehem

Social justice news
December 19, 2007

Bringing fair trade business to a little town called Bethlehem
In July of 2006 when Adam Neiman heard there was a union-run factory of Palestinian workers manufacturing clothing in Bethlehem, he booked a flight immediately. Neiman is CEO and founder of Bienestar International, a Boston-based company specializing in fair-trade, sweatshop-free clothing under the No Sweat label (Full disclosure: Salt of the Earth is an affliliate of No Sweat Apparel).

Upon landing in London to change planes, however, reports of fighting between Israelis and Lebanese broke out. Neiman, an American Jew, began to think hard about his plans to visit Palestine with such turmoil rocking the Middle East.

“It was kind of too late to turn back,” Neiman said. “My hosts were shocked.”

Neiman’s perseverance won him credibility with his Israeli and Palestinian hosts and helped eventually secure him a business relationship distributing T-shirts produced at the Bethlehem-based factory.

This Christmas, Neiman has initiated the Give Back to Bethlehem project – a way for Americans to provide economic assistance through fair trade to the troubled region.

The Palestinian Territory, and in particular Bethlehem, has traditionally relied heavily on an influx of tourism. The last six years of Israeli-Palestinian fighting has hurt that industry considerably. Although the situation has improved some over that time period, the number of guests and the number of overnight guests in Palestine in the first quarter of 2007 is still 41 percent and 58 percent lower, respectively, compared with the first quarter of 2000.

The one thing all sides agree upon, Neiman said, is that “more good jobs in Palestine for Palestinians would help.”

Other initiatives, such as Canaan Fair Trade and Peace Oil , seek to bring economic opportunity to Palestine as a way of combating fighting.

“It allows ordinary people to reach over the separation wall and ordinary Americans to help their neighbors on the other side of that wall in a very real kind of way,” Neiman said.

Neiman prides himself on the fact that most of the Palestinian workers are Muslim, the factory is owned by a Christian manufacturer and that he is a Jewish-American entrepreneur.

“All three religions have had a hand in creating this problem, have had a hand in sustaining this conflict and if it is to be solved it’s going to take all three religions lending a hand to do so,” Neiman said.—Matt Bigelow

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