BDS: “the bastard runt child of the old Arab boycotts”
[Jerusalem] Dani Dayan was the man of the hour at the anti-Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS) conference hosted by the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Acharonoth, its sibling website, ynet.co.il, and the British pro-Israel lobby Stand With Israel. [BDS is the anti-Israel campaign to boycott interaction with Israel, divest from companies doing business with Israel, and apply economic sanctions against Israel – Ed.]
The morning the conference started, the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Dayan would be Israel’s new Consul General in New York, holding ambassadorial rank.
The catch? About six months ago Dayan was appointed Israel’s ambassador to Brazil, only to have that job nixed by a left-wing Brazilian government appalled by his background as the long-time head of the umbrella organization of municipal councils of Jewish communities located on land Israel conquered in the 1967 war, known as “settlements.”
On stage at one of the morning sessions, Ronen Bergman, a typically assertive Israeli journalist, asked, “So, the Israeli government crumpled, eh?”
Dayan, already a diplomat, quickly turned the matter around. “It could have been a victory for BDS had the Israeli government crumpled,” he said. “And it would also have handed a victory to the Israeli branch of BDS—they gave legitimacy to Brazilian BDSers. There are even those in Israel who say you can boycott an ambassador! But, the same people who didn’t want a settlement leader in Brasilia got a settlement leader in New York, so in the end I think it counts as a victory for us.”
Dayan was being kind, having soundly criticized Netanyahu’s government for nominating him and as the controversy in Brazil grew to great proportions, hanging him out to dry.
The next man on the hotspot was Lars Faaborg-Andersen, a veteran Danish diplomat who serves as the European Union’s (EU) ambassador to Israel. But before even speaking, he was cheered, almost in a rah-rah fashion, for showing up despite having received “a letter from BDS telling him he could not appear with Dani Dayan,” according to presenter Dana Weiss.
Appearing somewhat discomfited, Faaborg-Andersen said, “Personally, I’m totally undeterred by these allegations against me. Sometimes I get letters from extreme, fanatic settlers, now, today, from BDS,” he pooh-poohed the matter.
“What is the exact policy of the EU?” Bergman started out.
“I want to be 100% clear,” Faaborg-Andersen replied. “The EU is against BDS. Our policy is the total opposite of BDS. Our policy is total engagement with Israel and we have a long track record to prove it.”
He then listed Europe’s long list of pro-Israeli characteristics, starting with the fact that it is the Jewish State’s biggest trade partner.
Behind the question on EU policies was a confusion wrought from a principal talking point of the Netanyahu administration: that anyone opposing Jewish settlements in the West Bank de facto opposes the State of Israel. In the past year, the EU issued a recommendation to its member states that products from such communities should not be labeled “Product of Israel.”
The Israeli government, which referred to it as being akin to a labeling policy reminiscent of that of the Nazis, has not annexed the West Bank, which it has held since the 1967 Middle East war, as part of the sovereign territory of Israel. Under Israeli law the area is under “military occupation” and it is governed by a branch of the Israeli army.
Here too, however, there was a catch. “The EU has a policy on settlements,” Faaborg-Andersen laid out.
“Products from settlements are welcome on the European market but they are not given the same preferential treatment we give products from Israel proper. This is no boycott at all. It is very, very important to distinguish between BDS and a policy we have on settlements. It is about giving the consumers the correct information.”
“Not even the Israeli government claims the West Bank is part of Israel, so why would the Israeli government have a problem?” he asked, with a sly rhetorical flourish.
Even the President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin, started the day out by emphasizing that “there is a big difference between legitimate criticism of Israel and BDS.”
“By lumping things together you give BDS a prominence it doesn’t have and you cut off dialogue with those who are critical but are not part of BDS.”
And there was the crux of the issue. Was the conference itself, an odd amalgam that felt like an exercise in pro-government advocacy but was, ostensibly, an intellectual gathering run by a news organization, in fact granting BDS a magnitude it does not actually possess? The pro-BDS cybersphere seemed inclined in that direction, with anti-Israel activists quickly adopting the conference hashtag #stopbds.
Daniel Birnbaum, the CEO of SodaStream, the fizzy water company that faced down a BDS storm when it hired Scarlett Johansson as its spokeswoman, accused the Netanyahu government of “seven years of mishandling this cold war.”
Furious, he said that “I find myself fighting my own government to get seventy-four verkakte permits so that my workers can work for me and for why? So the government can say that BDS has an effect?”
“We are bigger than Perrier!” he bellowed. “We left Mishor Adumim [the industrial zone bordering the West Bank, where SodaStream hired numerous Palestinian workers, who the Israeli government now is refusing to allow to work for the company within Israel proper] only for purely business reasons! So why does the government continue to insist that we gave in to BDS? We didn’t give one millimeter to the enemy!”
Brian Thomas, the pro-Israel blogger “Brian of London” at the website www.israellycool.com was similarly perplexed.
“I don’t know what this conference does,” he told The Media Line. “Our blog does a lot of poking fun at BDS. We laugh at them, but it’s a targeted fight. I am not so sure that the government of Israel bringing attention to it is a great thing and I’m not sure that a big conference like this is a great thing.”
Instead, he said, “I think we can fight this more acutely in local fights. In the UK, for example, by fighting it legally—BDS is illegal. Boycotting Israel because of the place of origin of its people is illegal across the EU. They don’t even need more laws.”
In fact, he said, with a dismissive wave, “the BDS we face today is the bastard, runt child of the organized state boycotts of the 1960s and 1970s. It’s the last dregs of nothing and it will be dispensed with.”
Dr. Mordechai Friedman, the retired academic director of the Zionist Archive and the author, most recently, of The Bush is Burning and Consumed: The Zionist Journey of Theodore Herzl, told The Media Line he was participating in the event as a man who devoted much of his adult life to international Jewish education. Between 1980-1985, he headed Israeli hasbara (positive imaging) on US college campuses on behalf of an organization called ISFI, the Institute of Students and Faculty on Israel.
“It interested me to see if there’s anything new. It turns out this is an outrage and it persists on US college campuses and elsewhere.”
Is there anything new? “No,” Friedman asserted.
But a sleek, primped out Roseanne Barr showed up, accompanied by her mother, and as if prompted stuttered out amusing epithets against the Jew-haters of the world.