Please join us in calling on Associated Bodywork and Massage Professionals (ABMP) to end their relationship with Wix, an Israeli corporation that is part of the boycott supported by the BDS movement aimed at ending the genocide that continues to unfold in Palestine.

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What is ABMP?‍

ABMP is a professional membership organization that insures more than half of the bodywork staff here at the Collective. In addition to being one of just two major liability insurance carriers in our field here in the US, they offer continuing education, run a podcast network, and offer things like marketing and web services to their members. 

They’ve recently partnered with Wix to run their member directory, as well as introduced a new tool that helps members build their own websites on the Wix platform. 

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Why Boycott Wix?

The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement supports a small number of focused boycotts with the goal of ending the genocide in Palestine, and pressuring Israel to comply with international law. Wix is very much on the list of boycott targets they support, and not simply for being an Israeli-based company (though the optics of their headquarters being a mere one-hour drive from Gaza is not lost on any of us).

Instead, it’s important to note that Wix has actively suppressed criticism of Israel. In 2023, they fired one of their workers at their Dublin offices for making social media posts critical of the Israeli occupation of Gaza. The President of Wix, Nir Zohar, justified the firing, saying that the employee’s comments had harmed the Israeli team’s spirit. The person who was fired ultimately won compensation surrounding a claim of unfair dismissal.

Around the same time as the firing, an internal company chat advised employees to “show Westernity” and said that “unlike the Gazans, we look and live like Europeans or Americans” That chat, titled “Supporting Israel Narrative” also discussed plans for Wix to take down websites determined to be “pro-Hamas”, even though some of the suggested criteria for identifying such websites included screening for images of Palestinian flags.

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What Actions have we taken?

We don’t believe that ABMP created this partnership with the knowledge that they were working with the target of an active boycott, and there’s absolutely zero evidence to suggest that they support the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

At this time, our members have chosen to remove any active listings we had on ABMP’s provider directory, which is now run by Wix. We are stopping short of ending our relationship with ABMP, and instead want to give them time to respond to our insistence that they rethink this partnership. 

We encourage all of our peers in the massage and bodywork community to join us in asking ABMP to put an immediate end to their relationship with Wix. We ask that you contact them ONLY if you are an active member of their organization. These are sweet folks with busy lives, and we mean them no distress.

You can email them at expectmore@abmp.com, or reach them by phone at 800-458-2267.

We will update this post with any news or further development.

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