Ok so the Girl Tel Aviv board was only a mock up (according to Slap), but presume this stuff is actually real as you can buy it.
Pretty wild collab, and interesting statement as that Chocolate product has been produced.
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Is lightwave the skateshop?
And do they support their government?
They should hook up the brother trying to teach skating in Palestine (cf Guardian article a while back)
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Presume it’s the shop, and according to Crail I guess they don’t support the regime.
But surely a load of the people to do with the shop will have served in the IDF by default?
Wild arena to step into.
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What genius in the Crailtap camp thought this would be a good idea?!
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One that wants to condemn what Isreal are doing to their neighbours. I wish more people with influence would do the same to be honest.
Not sure if this is the case with the Chocolate Tel Aviv stuff, but, over here, I think Form distribution handled the decks and clothing with the different UK city names on them. No idea whether there’d be a similar setup with a different distributor covering the Middle East.
Military service is mandatory over there, no?
I’m pretty sure quite a few israelis don’t support their government/leader (same can be said for Russia) but these people are the minority.
I like Crail’s attempt to praise their supporters around the globe albeit idealistic, but they probably should have waited on Israel.
Pulling the collab with that statemrnt looks like they were going ahead but suddenly read the room. In backtracking they’ve painted all israelis with the same brush.
Don’t mix politics and skateboarding unless your position is crystal clear.
eg Thibaud Trump re-release deck
You said don’t mix politics with skateboarding
Tel Aviv is just a city
The Israeli government is responsible for the bombardment in Gaza
Putting the name of a city on a board is not mixing politics with skateboarding Is it?
I don’t see the problem with the board at all
@hugo I get what you’re saying. A city is just buildings and people, and plenty of people in Tel Aviv don’t back their government. But I don’t think the name alone decides it. The association does. Think of a Berlin board going out worldwide in 1942. Berlin was just a city then too, and loads of decent people lived there. It still wouldn’t have gone down well, because of what the name stood for to everyone else at that moment.
Sorry to invoke Godwin’s Law so early…but Nazis make such a nice example. 
Anyhow, I’m not saying the two situations are the same. I’m saying the city’s name can’t be separated from what’s happening in its country’s name. The Lightwave sweatshirt is also done in blue and white, the flag colours according to their own product description, so it’s more than a neutral city name.
On Crailtap, I think their statement is pretty good, if a bit late. Ideally they’d have taken it seriously from the start. But this is a crew who started out as skate kids running a board company and ended up as adults fronting a globally known brand. And they are American/Canadian.
You can’t expect them to be experts in geopolitics, so I’m inclined to give them some slack.
@Dent_Face is spot on about distribution, and I think that’s exactly what has happened here.
Distributors often get to sign off on local graphics (Like Form for the UK boards).
Lightwave’s own listing mentions a 20+ year relationship with Chocolate, so this looks like the same thing.
Outside the big territories (UK, France, Germany, Spain), it’s mostly small distributors doing whatever they can to build what they’ve got. Some countries, the distributor is just the main shop. I’d put money on Lightwave being the distributor there, too.
Brands are constantly pulling back on locally made artwork. It’s a nightmare, even with the best of intentions.
Some locals assume that distributing a brand means they can do whatever they like with it. Go further into South America and it gets wild: Volcom in Brazil has had its own footwear line, and DC Argentina has made some of the maddest shirts you’ll ever see. Some of that is just advantage taking on badly written licensing deals but it’s the same pathway, really.
You can’t fully stop this kind of thing. This time it happened in about the worst place it could, and something that’s standard anywhere else - and just a bit of a pain in the arse - has landed the owners in a shitty spot.
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Genocide aside… Maybe the whole lazy schtick of putting cities on boards was a shit idea in the first place?
This raised a chuckle.
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And putting an Israeli city on a skateboard does that how?
I know it’s the distro, but they still need to be signed off at some point
If you’re a skater living in Tel Aviv, should you not be allowed a girl/chocolate board with your city’s name on?
If so, why not?
Because the country is performing a fucking genocide.
In my opinion, giving them a board is supporting the city, which is in the country, that is committing genocide.
You fund their economy more etc etc. Fuck Israel - the fact that there aren’t more people protesting in the country itself is mental, so you can see where most of the population lie.
@hugo when’s your one turning up?
I’m gunna start a board company and just whack Israeli cities on it.
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Then they should stop selling all Crail products in Israel if the tax money from those sales supports the genocide?
You don’t need to be a dick about it and ask when I’m getting one
I’m not pro Israel and condemn what’s happened in Gaza
I just see a lot of shit like this and wonder how my Jewish friends might feel
I would. Wouldn’t you? Why would you deal with a genocidal nation. I mean the U.K. and many other countries still do and that’s disgusting enough.
Im not gunna answer about your Jewish friends.
I think it’s pretty apparent this isn’t about Jews it’s about Zionism.
Lazy skateboard decks aside… Maybe the less things that people in Israel get to enjoy, the more they might make efforts to hold their government accountable for their actions.
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Exactly. You could place this furore in the wider context of the BDS movement, and the calls for companies to stop doing business in Israel:
You might say a skate company is small fry in the grand scheme of things, but the idea is that if enough businesses severed ties then that might create some sort of social/economic pressure in Israel for change.
As for your Jewish friends, I think it’s a really tough one. As @nedertron says, this isn’t an attack on Jewish people but is a response to the slaughter carried out by the state of Israel. We’re often reminded that to ask Jewish people to explain Israel’s actions is antisemitic, which I think is correct, but that works both ways - Jewish people have to accept that criticism of a genocidal state, and not Jewish people, is the morally correct position.
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I sold a bit of merch to a guy in Israel. When I saw the address I was gutted. Didn’t know what to do. Sent it in the end, maybe I shouldn’t have.
Now i just don’t send anything overseas
Everything is political
Because they shouldn’t live in Israel?