Confirming The Futility of Boycotts
In the latest of a series of extraordinarily self-defeating moves, Israel’s legislature, the Knesset, has just adopted the so-called “Boycott Bill,” penalizing any call within Israel to boycott Israel or its settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. The new law allows for civil suits against boycott supporters, denies them state benefits, and prevents the Israeli government from doing business with them. For a society terrified of what it sees as an international campaign of “delegitimization,” its own parliament could not have produced a more stunning blow to Israel’s legitimacy by conflating Israel as such with the settlements and the occupation. ~Hussein Ibish
Paul Pillar and Steve Clemons have similar reactions with more of a focus on the chilling effect this has on free political expression. There’s no question that the legislation is both illiberal and self-defeating in that it will confirm opponents of settlement policy in their resistance and make it that much harder for Western supporters to defend Israeli government behavior. What I haven’t seen from anyone is an acknowledgment that the passage of this legislation (which Israel’s High Court may find unconstitutional in any case) is clear proof of the self-defeating nature of boycott and divestment tactics by opponents of Israel’s illegal settlements. The so-called BDS movement has little chance of compelling a change in settlement policy for the same reason that attempts to penalize a state with sanctions of one sort or another usually fail in achieving their principal goals. As I wrote last year:
To the extent that these measures succeed in isolating a government, they allow that government to use international hostility as a bludgeon against its domestic critics and they make it easier to rally the population in support of the very policies that the boycotts and sanctions are targeting.
Conflating Israel and the settlements may be very bad for Israel in terms of its international reputation and its dealings with other states, but it is very useful to the cause of supporting the settlements. Of course, that is the point of the legislation: to raise the costs to Israelis and foreign companies when they oppose the settlements, and to bind settlements and Israel together to blunt challenges to the former. I have seen nothing that suggests that they are going to be unsuccessful. This is a reminder that boycotts and punitive measures do not change minds, and they are not really meant to change them. Their purpose is to make a statement of disapproval that the relevant government is bound to regard as a badge of honor.
2 Responses to “Confirming The Futility of Boycotts”
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OK, I’ll be the first one to ask: what about South Africa? Didn’t boycott/sanctions work there? Israel is a lot more similar, culturally, to apartheid South Africa than it is to Iran, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, etc.
On the other hand, Israel had been the object of a tertiary boycott for decades, with no serious damage. But on the third hand, that was a very different Israel back then, and a very different boycott, and most importantly, a very different Western world.
There’s also the fact that sanctions are probably not only the result of international disapproval, they’re likely a cause as well. Expressing one’s disapproval punitively can increase the strength of that disapproval. Boycotters hope (or should be hoping) for a snowball effect of disapproval. One of several important differences between Israel and Iran, for instance, is that Iran already had a really bad image in America. A sharp change for the worse in American attitudes towards Israel would hurt Israel very much. At least it would allow the US to apply real pressure.
So if I were anti-Israel, I’d definitely support BDS. I think it’s a good strategy against Israel exactly because Israel is seen as a friend by Americans.
Agreed that this Israeli legislation is stupid, though. It’s a matter of politicians pandering to their base; all politics are local. It might be chilling, I don’t know. It’s a truism that while Israel’s laws regarding speech are closer to Western Europe’s than to America’s, in practice political speech is a lot freer in Israel than in America.
“OK, I’ll be the first one to ask: what about South Africa?”
Before South Africa, there was Rhodesia. Back in 1965, I traveled to Europe via ocean liner (just to get it out of my system), and I met on board a nice young English woman and her mother. We struck it off, and they invited me to dinner at their flat, where the girl’s uncle was also present. That was around the time that Rhodesia was going through its throes. The uncle, a professional man of some sort, took the same attitude as Daniel when I raised the issue of boycott which had just been instituted, namely, that they never work. Granted, the demographics in Rhodesia favored the black Africans by 9 to 1, but I believe a case can be made that a boycott may have worked there to bring about change. Not that the change proved to be especially beneficial to the Rhodesians (now Zimbabweans) generally, black or white.