23 March 2024

Bob Brecher explains why BDS so infuriates Israelis in the following essay.

The Boycott Campaign and Israel’s Self-Image

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign (BDS) ‘supports Palestinian universities, staff and students’, and ‘opposes the continued illegal Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands with its concomitant breaches of international conventions of human rights, its refusal to accept UN resolutions or rulings of the International Court, and its persistent suppression of Palestinian academic freedoms’.[1] The BDS campaign endeavours thereby to contribute to a wider critique of, and action against, Israel’s genocidal Zionist regime, with its settler-colonial roots and realities – a contribution all the more urgent in light of the current slaughter in Gaza.[2]

My aim here is briefly to add to that endeavour by showing how BDS punctures Israel’s self-image as a “western” nation and why that matters for its campaign to undermine the Zionist settler colonial enterprise.[3] In short, the issue of Israeli self-perception illuminates something central about the Boycott campaign and its pivotal role as a specifically anti-Zionist effort. And that in turn explains Israel’s particularly vitriolic reaction to it.

It is uncontroversial to point out that central to Israel’s self-image is its long-proclaimed identity as a fundamentally “western”, indeed a European, polity. As Ariella Aisha Azoulay has recently argued in the case of literal images, ‘This staging of a battle of images, through which Israel seeks to deny, obfuscate, and extend its violence, is not new.’[4] The battle is not over just literal images though: it is a battle fundamentally about Israel’s self-image and how it plays out. Here is Netanyahu himself:

I would say… there is a constant battle between the forces of modernity and the forces of medievalism. That’s what we face today in the Middle East facing militant Islam. Facing militant Islam is not only Israel, but many of our Arab neighbors will understand that their future also could be compromised and endangered and crushed by these forces that hark back to a very dark past. So I would say that you can continue to move the arc forward… if you have the necessary will and power to protect civilization and to nurture it, but it could easily be wiped away by larger forces.[5]

Or, to take a more recent example from a hitherto rather different political home, we have Israel’s President Herzog’s incantatory claim that the current war against Hamas is intended ‘to save the values of Western civilization’.[6] And at a more general level, here is a Times of Israel piece:

the conflict between Israel and Hamas and the way in which it has reverberated across Europe and North America reflects a broader struggle between eastern and western ideologies. Israel is unfolding as the proverbial battleground for a clash of civilizations pitting western values – characterized by freedom, tolerance, individuality, and lawfulness – against their eastern antitheses.[7]

My contention is that this matters for the BDS campaign because, as these quotations illustrate, for “western” actors to impose a boycott on Israel is perceived by Israelis as denying its “western” status. And given that that status is fundamental to Zionist ideology, BDS offers a very specific threat.

To help see this more clearly, let me start by asking where, when and why boycott is taken up as a weapon, not by, broadly, the Left, but by “western” — that is to say American and European – governments themselves? More specifically, I want to change focus just for a moment from boycotts as conducted by ordinary citizens and/or non-governmental organisations, as for instance in the boycott by NGOs and others of a range of activities of apartheid South Africa and vigorously opposed by western governments. Rather I want to look at boycotts as organised and promulgated by these western governments.

What I have in mind are cases such as these: the western boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics on account of their being run by an ‘evil empire’; the current western boycott of Russia on account of its invasion of Ukraine; of Iran on account of its apparent nuclear capabilities and much else; of China on account of a whole range of its practices; and of Cuba on account of its resistance to capitalism.  In all these, as in many similar cases, there is of course an element – often a major element – of economic warfare, and thus of embargo, a specifically economic policy. Boycott, however, is an avowedly moral and political idea. It signals moral and/or political disapproval, whatever view one takes of such disapproval in particular cases: its role in the West’s “civilizing mission” as conducted by “liberal democratic” states, for example, or its non-neocolonial use by non-governmental bodies. Governmental boycott is a signal sent round the world that the objects of boycott are in various ways unfit to be treated with the normal courtesies; that those boycotted do not measure up to the “civilized standards” of “liberal democracy”. Hence it is entirely reasonable to subject them to boycott, to erect a metaphorical wall around them in order to cut them off from “the civilized world”. To put it succinctly, governmental boycotts such as these signify that the organisations, regimes, governments and countries that are subject to boycott are beyond the pale. The usual niceties do not apply. Those targeted are not states with whom one may sit down and come to an agreement; they are “rogue” states, fit only to be marked out as “lesser” and treated as such.

It is important to avoid a possible misunderstanding here. I am not at all claiming that imposing a boycott must involve viewing those targeted as somehow “lesser” than those carrying out the boycott. It is just that, as a matter of fact, the boycotts carried out by western regimes — such as those above — do precisely that; whereas those carried out by citizens’ groups and NGOs do not. This is not mere semantics: “boycott” does not name a metaphysical phenomenon, but rather a political instrument — no more and no less. The earlier examples do not at all exhaust possible sorts of boycott, or the possible sorts of reason for boycott, or the attitudes informing such and such a boycott (in these examples, a neo-colonial supremacism). The point is simply that these particular western governmental boycotts are implemented for such and such reasons and that they reflect such and such attitudes. And this matters because it is precisely in this sort of way that the Israeli state understands itself as being targeted. BDS – boycott, divestment, sanctions – strikes directly at its self-image and self-understanding as a fundamentally “western” polity and one on that account to be defended by the West against the “lesser beings” on whose land the Zionist state was founded. As Yoav Gallant, Israel’s Minister of Defence, charmingly put it in his infamous statement on 10 October 2023, ‘We are fighting human animals.’[8] Zionists have always been at pains protectively to underline their Europeanness, their “western” identity. Right from the start they saw themselves as bringing “western civilisation” to the “Middle East”; right from the start Israel’s self-image has been that of a bastion of “civilized” values and practices in “a hostile setting”. Hence the efforts to ensure that Israel is regarded not as Middle Eastern, but as European.

Here are just three more or less random material examples of how this pans out in the Israeli imaginary, facilitated of course by its western allies. Israel plays international football under the aegis of UEFA (Union of European Football Associations); it takes part in the Eurovision Song Contest; and it is a partner in the EU Erasmus + Programme. As for a cultural example, the most obvious is of course its racist, supremacist and altogether western attitudes to Arabs and Palestinians, and, concomitantly, its consistent refusal to recognise Palestinian nationhood.

In short: the more “savage” Israel’s own actions, the greater the need to underscore its  ideological “Europeanness”: hence the trajectory of Israeli propaganda since the country’s inception, a trajectory that as of today finds its apotheosis in Gaza. Hence, for all that the racism and the violence, both physical and epistemic, of liberal “westernhood” belies its pretence to universality and humanism, the official liberal line continues nonetheless to hold ideological sway as central to Israeli identity.

Hence, too, the fight about whose language will be heard and by whom, and about who determines what that language means. An obvious example is the enormous effort to enshrine the IHRA definition of ‘antisemitism’ that conflates it with anti-Zionism; another the notorious effort to reinterpret the slogan, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ Note also, of course, the sudden taste for so-called cancel culture that the Right has acquired – with a little help from Israel – and that is resulting in even sympathisers with, let alone supporters of, Palestine finding themselves barred from universities, art galleries and the media across the western world.

In light of all that, let us look at how BDS plays out in the Israeli imaginary. It is clear that, in terms of their own self-understanding as fundamentally European, as the bearers of European civilisation to the Middle East, Israelis are determined to understand themselves as absolutely not subject to treatment fit only for the uncivilized masses of the world, for those who are “less than” European. This is why they take their subjection to boycott as an unacceptable insult. In promulgating a boycott on account of what the Israelis do and what they stand for, those who do so are understood as at least implicitly denying Israel’s “westernhood”, a “westernhood” that has of course been carefully ideologically constructed — but which is for all that no less acutely felt and fought over. That is why Israelis, and of course their governments — and its western supporters — are particularly stung by being boycotted. To be grouped in this way by Westerners — not with the USA and (western) Europe, but with Iran, Russia, China and other “barbarians” — strikes at the heart of Israelis’ self-understanding. It serves to cast them out of Europeanhood as westerners themselves understand it.  It is an insult that precisely punctures their self-understanding and self-image. That is the fundamental reason why Israel goes to such lengths to persuade western governments to prevent, and even prohibit, their own citizens from boycotting Israel. For it is imperative that “western” citizens do not come anywhere even near to doubting the “Europeanness” of the Zionist state and its identity as an epitome of “western civilization” and “liberal democracy”.

It is thus not only the everyday content of the BDS campaign that is at issue, but rather – and even more importantly — the sheer thinkability of boycott as something to be used against Israel. It is precisely because governmental boycott is a weapon to be used only against those who do not measure up in terms of civilisational respectability, that is to say against those who are not “western” – as a “civilizing stick” — that the Israeli state is so greatly exercised by the BDS movement. For the more it flourishes, the greater the danger that civil society boycott might “spill over” and increasingly lead to the Zionist state’s claim to represent and defend “western civilization” being undermined. Such an undoing of its foundational myth would spell disaster for today’s Israel.

[1] ‘Bricup’s Mission’, as stated on its website: https://bricup.org.uk/about/ Accessed 28 December 2023.

[2] For a comprehensive justification of the BDS Campaign, see Nick Riemer, Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine (Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, 2023).

[3] The colonial supremacist nature of this self-image was identified long ago by Edward Said in his famous ‘The clash of ignorance’. Available at https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/clash-ignorance/. Accessed 18 Jan. 2024.

[4] ‘Seeing Genocide”’ Boston Review, 8 Dec. 2023. Available at https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/seeing-genocide/ . Accessed 28 Dec. 2023.

[5] ‘Secrets of Statecraft: The Historical heritage of Bibi Netanyahu’: interview with Andrew Roberts, Hoover Institution, 13 June 2022. Available at https://www.hoover.org/research/secrets-statecraft-historical-heritage-bibi-netanyahu  Accessed 28 Dec. 2023. For a detailed scholarly analysis, see  Ihsan Yilmaz and Nicholas Morieson, ‘Nationalism, Religion, and Archaeology: The Civilizational Populism of Benjamin Netanyahu and Likud’, European Center for Populism Studies, 10 October 2022. Available at https://www.populismstudies.org/nationalism-religion-and-archaeology-the-civilizational-populism-of-benjamin-netanyahu-and-likud/ Accessed 28 Dec. 2023.

[6] MSNBC interview, 5 Dec. 2023. Available at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v64TVMo2vKw Accessed 28 Dec. 2023.

[7] Emily Bose, ‘Israel’s proxy war for western values’, The Times of Israel, 20 Oct. 2023. Available at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israels-proxy-war-for-western-values/ Accessed 28 Dec. 2023.

[8] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbPdR3E4hCk

[1] ‘Bricup’s Mission’, as stated on its website: https://bricup.org.uk/about/ Accessed 28 December 2023.

[1] For a comprehensive justification of the BDS Campaign, see Nick Riemer, Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine (Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, 2023).

[1] The colonial supremacist nature of this self-image was identified long ago by Edward Said in his famous ‘The clash of ignorance’. Available at https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/clash-ignorance/. Accessed 18 Jan. 2024.

[1] ‘Seeing Genocide”’ Boston Review, 8 Dec. 2023. Available at https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/seeing-genocide/ . Accessed 28 Dec. 2023.

[1] ‘Secrets of Statecraft: The Historical heritage of Bibi Netanyahu’: interview with Andrew Roberts, Hoover Institution, 13 June 2022. Available at https://www.hoover.org/research/secrets-statecraft-historical-heritage-bibi-netanyahu  Accessed 28 Dec. 2023. For a detailed scholarly analysis, see  Ihsan Yilmaz and Nicholas Morieson, ‘Nationalism, Religion, and Archaeology: The Civilizational Populism of Benjamin Netanyahu and Likud’, European Center for Populism Studies, 10 October 2022. Available at https://www.populismstudies.org/nationalism-religion-and-archaeology-the-civilizational-populism-of-benjamin-netanyahu-and-likud/ Accessed 28 Dec. 2023.

[1] MSNBC interview, 5 Dec. 2023. Available at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v64TVMo2vKw Accessed 28 Dec. 2023.

[1] Emily Bose, ‘Israel’s proxy war for western values’, The Times of Israel, 20 Oct. 2023. Available at https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israels-proxy-war-for-western-values/ Accessed 28 Dec. 2023.

[1] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbPdR3E4hCk