Is it right to boycott Israel?

Public figures including Stephen Fry, Sharon Osborne and Marina Abramovic have signed a letter denouncing the proposed Eurovision boycott by protesters who say this year’s song contest should not be held in Israel.

The joint statement argues that the “spirit of togetherness” represented by Eurovision is “under attack” by those who want the grand final next month to be moved from Tel Aviv.

It continues: “We believe the cultural boycott movement is an affront to both Palestinians and Israelis who are working to advance peace through compromise, exchange and mutual recognition. While we all may have differing opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the best path to peace, we all agree that a cultural boycott is not the answer.”

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The publication of the letter comes in response to widespread calls for participating artists and broadcast partners to shun the contest. The Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement has claimed that Israel is “shamelessly using Eurovision as part of its official Brand Israel strategy, which presents ‘Israel’s prettier face’ to whitewash and distract attention from its war crimes against Palestinians”.

Protests against the Israeli regime have gathered steam in recent decades, with world leaders including Archbishop Desmond Tutu calling on the international community to treat Israel as it did apartheid South Africa.

But critics claim that such a boycott targets the wrong people. Author J.K. Rowling argued in 2015 that “severing contact with Israel’s cultural and academic community means refusing to engage with some of the Israelis who are most pro-Palestinian, and most critical of Israel’s government”. The Economist has noted that “blaming Israel alone for the impasse in the occupied territories will continue to strike many outsiders as unfair”.

So who is right?

The history of anti-Israeli boycott

Israel has faced a series of boycotts ever since it was founded, in 1948. Perhaps the largest and most effective was that organised by the Arab League, which severed infrastructure between Arab states and Israel, and imposed economic sanctions on Israeli goods and services. This boycott ended in 1994, following the signing of the Oslo Peace Accord, a set of agreements between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

However, a re-escalation of tensions led to the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000. Following the conclusion of the intensified Israeli–Palestinian violence, in 2005, more than 170 Palestinian NGOs and labour unions teamed up to form the BDS movement.

The stated goal of the BDS campaign continues to be to put economic, cultural and other types of pressure on Israel until it withdraws from the occupied territories; removes the separation barrier in the West Bank; ensures full equality for Arab citizens of Israel; and grants the right of return of Palestinian refugees driven from the new state of Israel in the 1940s.

Major firms including Veolia, Orange, G4S and CRH have fully or partially pulled out of Israel following boycott campaigns. And scores of student governments and academic associations worldwide have endorsed boycott and divestment initiatives, including severing academic links with Israeli scholars and institutions.

In the UK, Leicester City Council passed a policy in 2014 to boycott goods produced in Israeli settlements in the West Bank. The Scottish government published a procurement notice to Scottish councils that “strongly discourages trade and investment from illegal settlements” in the same year.

Since its founding 13 years ago, “BDS has acquired nearly as many enemies as the Israelis and Palestinians combined”, writes Nathan Thrall, director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, in an article for The Guardian.

Not only has the movement “infuriated the Israeli government by trying to turn it into a leper among liberals and progressives”, but it has also “shamed the Palestinian Authority government” and annoyed the PLO by “encroaching on its position as the internationally recognised advocate and representative of Palestinians worldwide”, Thrall says.

However, in recent years BDS has “effectively won the argument inside Palestine”, with the PLO officially endorsing the movement since January 2018, he adds.

Is a boycott justified?

Opposition to BDS is widespread and strong, particularly from the US. As of the end of 2018, 24 American states had enacted legislation that allows for some kind of sanctions against those who openly engage in or advocate the tactics of BDS, and similar legislation is pending on a federal level.

Perhaps Israel’s most powerful tool in the campaign against BDS has been to accuse the country’s critics of prejudice against Jews. In 2014, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu claimed that people who support BDS were practising “anti-Semitism in a new garb”.

The alleged basis for these allegations against the movement “is that through their three goals listed in their manifesto, they express their rejection of Jews’ right to self-determination in their homeland”, says The New York Times’ Joseph Levine. But in a speech to Brooklyn College that was published by The Nation, American Jewish philosopher Judith Butler argued that the allegation of anti-Semitism springs from a false “generalisations about all Jews” that presumes “they all share the same political commitments”.

In addition, attacks on the Israeli state by means of a boycott need not signify a fundamental opposition to the existence of the state itself, writes Peter Speetjens on the Middle East Eye news site.

Opponents of apartheid boycotted South Africa for more than 30 years, “yet no one ever denied the South Africans as a people the right to self-determination nor South Africa as a country the right to exist”, Speetjens says.

Other critics of BDS have highlighted the issue of double standards, with Forbes’ Evan Gerstmann claiming that “too many” US universities are adopting “academic boycotts that single out Israel while leaving in place academic programmes that send students to countries that are major human rights violators”.

But the movement’s supporters insist that these alleged double standards do not negate their arguments.

Almost every earlier divestment and boycott initiative around the world “could be accused of double standards, including the campaign against apartheid South Africa, most of whose proponents ignored graver transgressions elsewhere, such as the concurrent genocides in Cambodia, Iraqi Kurdistan and East Timor”, says The Guardian’s Thrall.