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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 […]

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.

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