AP Photo/Ariel Schalit
"We are in the midst of a great struggle being waged against the State of Israel," Benjamin Netanyahu warned in a statement to the media before a recent cabinet meeting. A warning like that from Israel's prime minister isn't new. Neither was his identifying the threat as a modern expression of eternal anti-Semitism. "It is not connected to our actions. It is connected to our very existence. ... Now, this is a phenomenon that we have known in the history of our people. ... They said we are the foundation of evil in the world. They said that we are the poisoners of the wells of humanity."
That's all classic Netanyahu rhetoric. The twist was that he wasn't talking about the Iranian regime, but about what he portrayed as a powerful international campaign to isolate and boycott Israel. Why now?
In comparison, Netanyahu's "this is 1938 and Iran is Nazi Germany" campaign was reality-based. One could disagree with Netanyahu's monomania about Iran and his strategy for dealing with it. But nukes, after all, are seriously dangerous. In comparison, BDS-Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions-against Israel remains a fringe phenomenon, speaking loudly but carrying a small stick. As the Israeli daily Ma'ariv reported this week in response to the BDS panic, the country's economy is growing healthily. It has a balance of trade surplus, something that was once unimaginable. Exports are up; so is tourism. The leaders of high-tech mega-corporations continue to make pilgrimages, to shop for Israeli start-ups and to expand their development centers in Israel. Until BDS morphs into a convincing worldwide movement to boycott Google, Intel, Facebook, and Apple, a significant economic impact on Israel is unlikely. Don't hold your breath.
In fact, the actual impact of BDS at the moment is to help Netanyahu stay in power-a favor he is returning by publicizing the movement and giving its activists an undeserved feeling of accomplishment.
One reason for Netanyahu's choice of a new devil is the approaching deal on Iran's nuclear program. For now, he has apparently accepted that he has lost the battle against the accord. Top Israeli military officers, off the record, say the agreement may actually be good for Israel.
Politically and psychologically, Netanyahu can't live without someone or something to fill the role of the anti-Semite about to destroy the Jewish people, to which he equates the State of Israel.
The sudden focus on BDS also helps Netanyahu and his new, narrow right-wing government in its escalating effort to shut down domestic opposition. Netanyahu signaled the direction in his infamous Election Day fear-mongering about large Arab turnout. "Leftists organizations are bringing them in buses," he said, thereby including Jewish critics in the alleged fifth column attempting a coup via the ballot box. Netanyahu's Likud and its coalition partner, the Jewish Home party, are determined to push through the NGO Bill, designed to strangle funding of Israeli human rights groups by foreign governments, especially the purportedly Israel-hating governments in Europe. In a speech against BDS last week in parliament, Justice Minister Ayalet Shaked tossed in an attack on Breaking the Silence-an organization of Israeli veterans that collects soldiers' testimony about serving in occupied territory-for "defaming" Israel.
This week, as part of a wider offensive against cultural institutions, Culture Minister Miri Regev announced that she'll cut a government grant to a Jewish-Arab theater because its artistic director has refused to perform in a West Bank settlement as part of another troupe. "In this time of a diplomatic battlefront," Regev said, referring to the government's anti-BDS campaign, "everything possible must be done to stop those who give ammunition to our enemies. I won't lend a hand to harming Israel's image abroad." Regev neatly conflated opposition to settlement with enmity toward Israel as such, and failed to see that she herself was taking a sledgehammer to Israel's image. The painful irony is that advocates of cultural and academic boycotts of Israel target the sectors of Israeli society-academia, the film industry, the artistic and literary communities-that produce the strongest debate about the country's direction. Make a really good movie, and you can be targeted both for being Israeli and for being anti-Israeli.
The immediate cue for the anti-BDS campaign was the Palestinian attempt to have Israel expelled from FIFA, thereby banning it from international soccer competition. Amid the wider crisis in FIFA, the head of the Palestinian soccer organization, Jabril Rajoub, backed down at the last moment, realizing he was far from getting the 75 percent support he needed. A few days later, at a press conference in Cairo, the head of the telecom giant Orange, Stephane Richard, said his company would gladly pull out of Israel "tomorrow morning" but for the "level of penalties" it could incur for breaking its contract with the Israeli cellular provider Partner. Richard quickly backed down, with pressure from the French government-a one-quarter owner-possibly playing a role.
As it happens, the same French government is pushing a Security Council resolution that will call for rapid negotiations leading to an Israeli-Palestinian two-state agreement based on the pre-1967 boundaries. European countries that would have voted against expelling Israel from FIFA are surely among those supporting a looming European Union decision to require imports produced in West Bank settlements to be clearly labeled as such. That way they won't be hidden behind the label "Made in Israel."
European sanctions against settlements-unlike a large portion of the BDS campaign-draw a clear line between support for Israel and opposition to the occupation. They have the potential to convey to the Israeli public that settlement and Netanyahu's intransigence are what's hurting Israel-not inescapable, incurable anti-Semitism. They convey that there is a way out-a two-state agreement. In contrast, boycotts of companies that operate inside Israel, or of Israeli academics, or films, convey enmity toward Israel as such. The tactic is the message, and the message that gets across is what fits in a headline. Fine print doesn't help.
Netanyahu and his partners don't want the distinction between the two types of sanctions to be visible to the Israeli public, any more than they want the Green Line-the border between Israel and occupied territory-to appear on Israeli maps. So one more reason for the switch to BDS as the devil du jour is to blur the difference with much noise and passion.
The BDS campaign is Bibi Netanyahu's unintentional ally but culpable in this, especially when activists implicitly or explicitly call for an outcome that would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority state. Netanyahu is at least as culpable, if not more, in promoting BDS. His stonewalling feeds despair of achieving a fair Israeli-Palestinian political outcome and thereby fuels extreme stances. Besides that, he's giving the movement publicity and an image of strength that it couldn't achieve otherwise.
Bibi-BDS: It's a coalition of exaggerated rhetoric and political hopelessness.
