Israeli Startup Creates Popular BDS-Coordinating Apps

“By selling our product and follow-on support to BDS movement coordinators from here in Israel, we recouped the initial investment capital within six months of going to market.”

Herzliya Pituach, July 17 – Amid the dense concentration of high-tech companies with headquarters or development centers in this city north of Tel Aviv, the relatively unknown Associated Social Software (ASS) is hardly a major player. But in the small yet noisy world of the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement, ASS provides much of the oomph with its boycott-coordinating applications.

ASS apps, developed in Israel and sold to BDS activists worldwide, allow far-flung activists to zero in on specific Israeli exports and conduct a coordinated effort to create local embargoes instead of a hodgepodge of individual campaigns scattered across different continents. Each app is packaged differently, but all five of the major BDS ASS apps are based on the same set of core processes. The apps download up-to-date information from ship manifests and tracking data to determine what Israeli products have been exported to which countries, and identifies potential products, product lines, or Israeli brands that can be targeted.

Arnie Lokayam, 30, founded ASS three years ago, and BDS activists immediately gravitated toward the groundbreaking software. “It was clear to our development team that there was a market niche waiting to be tapped,” he recalled in an interview. “By selling our product and follow-on support to BDS movement coordinators from here in Israel, we recouped the initial investment capital within six months of going to market.” Lokayam says he hired only local workers, conscious of the need to reduce carbon-emitting air travel. “We would have hired people from all over, and had them work remotely, but I’m a big believer in having my team all in one place.”

As a result, according to publicly released corporate data, ASS has contributed upwards of eighteen million shekels to the coffers of the State Treasury in employee and corporate income tax revenue, not including National Insurance payments that contribute directly to welfare payments for Israeli parents and low-income residents. Lokayam expressed confidence that his clients, who are invariably supporters of liberal, socialist-oriented causes, would be similarly gratified to know that their business is helping ASS make significant contributions to Israel’s welfare state.

“We’ve also been engaged in a good bit of corporate philanthropy,” added the father of three. “Our favorite charities are ones that help victims of Palestinian terrorism,” yet another way in which the company’s values dovetail with the BDS movement’s known concern for human rights.

The most recent version of the product, according to Lokayam, is called Divest Organizing Operations For Universal Sanctions (DOOFUS), a general-purpose BDS-coordinating tool that provides high-level data on all types of Israeli securities that are traded on exchanges elsewhere in the world. DOOFUS monitors the activity of these stock issues and advises the user on recommended times to make an offer for those stocks or bonds, to encourage holders of those investment to part with them, and demonstrate the undesirability of Israeli investments.