OPINION:
Boycotts are tempting weapons when persuasion doesn’t work, but except in rare, special circumstances where alternatives are scarce, such as Martin Luther King’s celebrated bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., more than a half-century ago, boycotts don’t work, either.
Dozens of Palestinian organizations, with help from naive academics in the United States and Britain, are trying to wound Israel with its so-called “BDS movement” — boycott, divestment and sanction — demanding boycotts, divestment of investments in corporations considered not sufficiently sympathetic to the Palestinians, and sanctions of various kinds against the Jewish state. So far it’s mostly noise and hot air.
The goals of the Palestinians who started the movement a decade ago are bold and straightforward. They want Israel to end its “occupation” of lands claimed by the Arabs and dismantle the wall that prevents terrorists to enter Israel, grant full rights to Palestinians and Arabs who live in Israel, and enable Palestinians to return to the land they lost when the Arabs lost the wars they imposed on Israel.
The Palestinians make a point of saying the BDS movement must be nonviolent, making it easier to recruit allies in the faculty lounges of American and British universities, but some demonstrations, particularly in Australia and South Africa, became violent. The Simon Wiesenthal Center, which monitors these things, notes that the BDS movement has made a point of not denouncing political violence against Israelis and other Jews.
The campaign has hardly succeeded — the Wall is still there, and so is Israel — but the beat goes on. The reason it has not accomplished its goals, Adrienne Yaron observes in the Jerusalem Post, is that it can’t succeed unless millions of people across the globe are willing to give up their necessities, luxuries and even their health. Of Israel’s top 10 exports, only two are consumer products, ordinarily vulnerable to boycotts, and these two are pharmaceuticals and medical equipment.
Do the boycotters propose, she asks, that “anyone with AIDS or HIV [infections] boycott the best HIV medications available? Or that diabetics will boycott the easiest and most painless insulin administrators, or the newly developed artificial pancreas? Will blind people really refuse to use technology that describes the world to them in real time because it was engineered by an Israeli?”
The list of the latest vaccines, therapeutics and medical treatments invented and produced in Israel is a long one, and anyone who needs them would find it difficult to find a substitute. It’s unlikely that many people with cancer, even dedicated anti-Semites, would prefer a shortened life rather than avail themselves of serums and treatments produced by Jews. Jimmy Carter, the former president who has made it clear that he doesn’t like Israel very much, uses Jewish-made treatments.
Most of Israel’s exports, however, are industrial-grade goods, like water-technology software, sold through governments and never purchased by individual consumers who might look through a list of boycotted items before buying. These products are usually unique and unavailable elsewhere. The BDS movement is aware of this and its Web site instructs supporters to concentrate on fresh produce, grown by farmers who first made the desert bloom.
But such produce constitutes only about 3.6 percent of Israel’s exports, and most of it goes to Russia, where consumers are more interested in eating Israeli tomatoes and potatoes than in supping on Palestinian propaganda of professors in the West. “The BDS movement has not had and will never have any significant economic effect on Israel’s overall economy,” Adrienne Yaron of the Jerusalem Post writes, “because Israel’s economy is grounded in products and services that effectively cannot be boycotted.”
Goods and services are more difficult to produce than hot air, despite all the huffing and puffing. That’s why boycotts are mostly noise that can annoy and irritate. But it’s hard to strike mortal blows on a free economy.
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