Secret US meeting highlights Israel’s panic over boycott

The sudden gathering of pro-Israel supporters in Las Vegas shows how far the narrative has shifted – and how unlikely Israel's supporters are to reclaim it, writes Dalia Hatuqa

"With BDS' growing activism come Israeli fears of further ostracism." Pep Montserrat for The National
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This week, Israel woke up to news that the UK’s National Union of Students voted to formally ally itself with the principles of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, followed swiftly by the shock that France’s telecoms giant Orange intends to divest from Israel over its illegal settlements.

Israel’s parliament meanwhile held an emergency debate on growing international boycott calls, amid rising concern that these movements are gathering momentum.

Since its creation about a decade ago, the BDS movement has striven to find alternative means of pressuring Israel to end its occupation and grant its own Palestinian citizens equal rights. It has grown in size and power substantially since then, and with it so have the milestones related to academics, writers and artists observing the group’s aims.

But until recently, BDS was being addressed by Israel and its supporters mainly through lip-service, which aimed to delegitimise its efforts. Many trivialised its accomplishments and brushed the movement’s efforts aside, with some saying BDS’ economic effect was tantamount to mere “pocket change”. But today, the movement and its work is being taken more seriously than ever before.

An anti-BDS tsar – Israeli minister Gilad Erdan – was recently assigned to combat “anti-Israel” measures. The Israeli state and its supporters have launched counter-campaigns and poured millions of dollars into addressing BDS measures.

In the US, Israel’s supporters are deeply worried about BDS on college campuses. This type of activism has garnered the attention of the casino magnet, media mogul and prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s principal financial backer, Sheldon Adelson.

This weekend, Mr Adelson is hosting a meeting with top donors and pro-Israel activists in Las Vegas to discuss means to counter BDS’s influence on US college campuses.

The meeting was supposed to be kept under wraps, until an American newspaper leaked it. The gathering marks a change in the approach taken to tackle boycott measures.

Though there have been concerted efforts on the part of pro-Israel groups to specifically target BDS’s narrative in the past two years, this meeting marks the evolution of counter efforts from grass roots to the boardroom – more proof of rising pro-Israel fears of international isolation.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has reached a new arena, away from the segregated streets of Hebron and cramped refugee camps of Gaza, and even past its new period of “internationalisation” at the United Nations and the Hague; it is now campaigns on social media asking musicians to skip their Tel Aviv tour dates or students organising on college campuses.

With BDS’s growing activism come Israeli fears of further ostracism. And instead of addressing the core of the issue – the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the siege of Gaza – Israeli politicians have resorted to vilification, calling BDS everything from anti-semitic to “a form of terrorism”.

Voices in Israel’s right-wing government singling out the movement for criticism appear to have increased in light of the (albeit botched) Palestinian bid to have Israel suspended from Fifa. But the issues has been given an added urgency because of increased successes to boycott Israel in the international arena.

Those measures, however, have also meant subjecting pro-Palestine supporters to a harsh crackdown that has seen anti-free speech measures used to stifle legitimate criticism of Israel’s occupation.

In the US, for example, many pro-Palestine supporters on campuses have been subject to harsh repercussions for speaking out against Israeli policies in the West Bank and Gaza.

This response may seem heavy-handed, especially since pro-Palestine campus groups are decentralised and receive little funding – many of their activities range from erecting faux “separation walls” and checkpoints akin to the Israeli ones across the West Bank.

But it may be activities like these that have contributed to the passing of divestment resolutions by many university student bodies.

That, at least, is the fear among Israel’s supporters. They fear they have lost control over the narrative used to describe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Concern over academic and cultural boycotts has ignited across Israeli media. The daily Yedioth Ahronoth, which launched a campaign earlier this week under the banner “Fighting the boycott”, reported on how Israeli academia was quietly being boycotted and listed incidents of academic journals declining to publish articles by Israelis, or foreign lecturers declining offers to come to Israel for conferences.

It also reported a meeting between Israeli president Reuven Rivlin and the heads of several top universities, who said that averting international boycott must be a top priority for Israel. They also warned that international measures against the nation’s academic institutions would result in a severe “economic and scientific disaster”.

During Sunday’s cabinet meeting, Benjamin Netanyahu once again tried to delegitimise BDS efforts by saying the country faces an “international campaign to blacken its name”, with the aim of denying Israel’s right to exist.

Mr Netanyahu’s statement is part acknowledgement, part hyperbole aimed at turning BDS into the new bogeyman – Israel still very much enjoys monumental support from the US, Europe and elsewhere.

Yet without exaggerating the effects of BDS, the persistence and internationalisation of boycott efforts have left a mark on Israel, and as the stranglehold on the West Bank and Gaza approaches its 50-year mark, it seems more likely that criticism of Israel will continue, along with boycott and sanction pressures.

Writing earlier this week about the Fifa bid, an Israeli writer, Nahum Barnea, said it may have been easy to deter the Palestinian Authority from going through with its Fifa suspension bid.

But he acknowledged that: “From one junction to another, from one vote to another, it is becoming increasingly difficult for [a large part of Israel’s friends in the West] – both morally and politically – to defend the Israeli policy in the West Bank.”

Dalia Hatuqa is a journalist living between the US and Palestine

On Twitter: @DaliaHatuqa