The Boycott Isn't Economic Warfare, It's Psychological

[Purveyor]

It does not have to bring the Israeli economy to its knees, or even close, to force an end to the occupation.

By Larry Derfner
|Published February 11, 2014

Now that it’s a very common, almost consensus view that Israel faces isolation and serious economic pain if it does not end the occupation, the skeptics are weighing in. They’re saying that the BDS movement, academic boycott and Europe’s anti-settlement policy toward Israeli businesses, even though they are intensifying, have hardly made a dent in this country’s material quality of life. (Here, here, here and here.) Deals are still being made, rock stars are still coming to perform, Israel’s economy is still outdoing most of those in the West. As for the future, such commentators, who are by no means all from the right, are saying that even if the number of boycotters grows, they will still amount to drops in the bucket, and Israel’s economic and political power will thwart any attempt to pressure the country’s leaders into changing course.

I think they miss the point. It’s true that the Israeli economy as a whole is hardly feeling the boycott (though a fast-growing number of companies are), and it’s unimaginable that the economic and political isolation of Israel will ever approach that of apartheid-era South Africa (for lots of reasons, including Israel’s exalted standing in the U.S.). But it doesn’t have to approach what happened in South Africa. The boycott doesn’t have to bring the Israeli economy to its knees, or anything close, for the Israeli body politic – the public, the opinion-makers and the decision-makers – to decide to end the occupation. All the boycott has to do is keep growing, drop by drop – yes, like Chinese water torture – for it to succeed. Because finally, the boycott is not an economic war against Israel, it’s a psychological war, and even the skeptics would agree that it’s already had a deep, damaging effect on this country’s will to continue fighting for the West Bank and Gaza.

The experience of the last nine months, starting with Stephen Hawking’s no-show in Jerusalem for the Presidential Conference – which brought the boycott movement into the mainstream, a process that has been escalating ever since – has begun to work a profound change for the worse in Israelis’ view of the country’s future. It’s been many years since they believed it was going to improve, that peace was a realistic possibility. Except for a short-lived interlude of belief in “Sharon’s way” – unilateral withdrawal – after the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, there’s been a sense of stagnation here since the Second Intifada killed the Oslo Accords in late 2000. The Netanyahu years have been secure but grim; the only movement has been toward more settlements and more loathing for leftists and Arabs, more of what the country is already stuffed full of. Five years of bloat and stagnation. It’s not for nothing that the new hit of the last election, Yair Lapid, named his party Yesh Atid – There Is a Future. That’s what the public wanted – a future, something to look forward to, because the future they saw was nothing but more of the same bellicose rut interrupted by periodic wars.

But Israelis had learned to live with that and they could go on living with it. The future, if not inviting, seemed tolerable. And that’s what the boycott has changed: Suddenly the future does not look like more of the same. It looks like it’s going to be increasingly worse than the way things are now. The world is turning against us, and not just in word, but in deed. Even Germany is starting to crack down. It’s not going to get any better, the occupation is not going to win us any new friends, but evidently it is going to make us a lot of new enemies.

MORE...

http://972mag.com/the-boycott-isnt-an-economic-warfare-its-psychological/87069/

[aranthus]

1. At least he admits that it's warfare.

Now if he and others like him will finally recognize that it's a war against the existence of the Jewish state. Baby steps.

[bravenak]

2. I guess it must be having some effect.

But I still think it economics.