#boycottBrooklinen
Boycott Brooklinen: Apartheid’s Favorite Sheets
Brooklinen wants to sell you a lifestyle of comfort, but it’s hiding uncomfortable truths underneath its sheets!
Trendy Brooklyn-based linen company Brooklinen sells sheets that are made in Israel by an Israeli company, Offis Textile. Offis Textile’s office is located in a town that was ethnically cleansed of Palestinians. Offis has also been involved Israel’s illegal settlements and exploited captive Palestinian laborers. Offis’s taxes fund Israel’s apartheid rule over the Palestinian people.
Brooklinen, which calls itself “the Internet’s favorite sheets,” conducts most of its sales online, but now has two New York City stores, one in Williamsburg and the other in Greenwich Village, and says that it plans to open more stores.
Palestinian civil society has called on people of conscience to boycott the products of companies complicit in Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights, in order to pressure Israel to comply with international law.
Brooklinen’s Involvement with Israeli Apartheid
The office and main factory of Brooklinen’s partner Offis Textile are in the town of Azur, which was built on the ruins of the Palestinian town of Yazur, just outside of what is now Tel Aviv. Zionist militias attacked Yazur prior to Israel’s establishment in 1948, forcing all 4,000 Palestinian residents to flee their homes, never to return, as part of the Palestinian Nakba, or catastrophe, during which Israel drove 800,000 Palestinians from their homes.
In 2011, Offis Textile told the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz that its products were sewn in Barkan, an illegal Israeli settlement on stolen Palestinian land in the West Bank, and in other towns where Palestinians live under Israeli military occupation, or as second-class citizens. Offis said it chose these locations due to the cheap cost of labor, effectively exploiting Palestinians, deprived of their basic rights, in sweatshops.
“Brooklinen: In bed with Israeli apartheid” – Adalah-NY protest at Brooklinen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Today, other than noting that its sheets are made in Israel, Brooklinen avoids commenting on Offis Textile, or saying where its sheets are sewn.
A 2020 Israeli government report shows that Offis Textile is 26.8% owned by the Israeli company Ofertex which is located in Israel’s Barkan settlement. Ofertex is on the United Nations list of companies identified as complicit in Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise. Ofertex also has a track record of violating the rights of its Palestinian workers.
Brooklinen is also marketing its online products through the start-up Israeli e-commerce platform Yotpo.
Brooklinen founder Rich Fulop has supported Birthright Israel, an organization that offers every young Jewish person a free trip to Israel, with some going on to become citizens of Israel, while adamantly denying the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland, and to their villages, like Yazur.