Oxfam sacks Sex and the City's Kristin Davis for joining Dead Sea firm.
By E.B. SOLOMONT, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENTKristin Davis Ahava 248.88(photo credit: AP)Sex and the City star Kristin Davis has inadvertently waded into Middle East politics.
Until recently, Davis served as an ambassador for the humanitarian group Oxfam International. But in a letter circulated last week, Oxfam indicated it was suspending "publicity work" with Davis, because she signed on in 2007 as a spokeswoman for Ahava cosmetics, which is produced beyond the Green Line.
According to Oxfam, Ahava creams, lotions and other goodies are manufactured in "disputed" territory. Ahava has a factory on Kibbutz Mitzpe Shalem, located beyond the Green Line on the Dead Sea coast.
"When Kristin signed the contract with Ahava she wasn't aware of the controversy around settlement trade and Oxfam didn't know she had signed with Ahava," a manager for Oxfam's ambassador program said in the letter, reported Thursday in the New York Post. "Oxfam remains opposed to settlement trade, in which Ahava is engaged."
While a spokesman for Oxfam told the Jerusalem Post that ties with Davis were not permanently severed, he said Oxfam has no short-term projects in the pipeline for her. "We just don't want this to be a distraction," he said.
Ahava did not immediately comment.
But organizers of a grassroots women's peace group, CODEPINK, speculated that the Israeli cosmetics company recruited Davis precisely because of her ties to Oxfam.
"Ahava, in hiring Kristin Davis, was hiring her for her fresh-faced look, her connection to 'Sex and the City,' and the fact that she's a do-gooder," said Nancy Kricorian, the coordinator of CODEPINK's new "Stolen Beauty" campaign against Ahava. "It's a way of burnishing their image." She said in June, CODEPINK attended a New York City publicity event with Davis, where they handed her a letter outlining their concerns about Ahava.
Davis, whose character Charlotte York converted to Judaism on the show, visited Israel for the first time last spring. Speaking to reporters at the time, she declined to discuss Middle East politics or the peace process. She praised Israeli women for "being comfortable in their own skins." A spokeswoman for Davis told the New York Post, "Kristin is passionate about her relationship with Oxfam, and she intends to work with them and other humanitarian causes for years to come."
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