The Fabulous Failure of Boycotting Israel

Arguably the most successful “pro-Palestinian” strategy, the BDS movement spells disaster — for Palestinians.

The BDS movement invents all sorts of narratives like “genocide” to fuel outrage against the Jewish state. (photo: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement/Facebook)

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This is a guest essay written by Pat Johnson of Pat’s Substack.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

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The boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign (better known as “BDS”) may be the most successful component of the worldwide Palestinian movement.

But that says a lot. Its goal — harming Israel economically — has failed fabulously.

Israel’s economy keeps humming along, and Israelis have by far the most advanced economy in the region.

The people most hurt by BDS are Palestinians.

BDS, and the larger “denormalization” strategy, ensures that Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims are quarantined from the most successful, innovative, positive force in the region.

This is typical.

The Palestinian movement is one of history’s greatest examples of a people cutting off their nose to spite their face.

The Palestinian movement is almost exclusively oppositional, never aspirational. It does not build, it tears down. It does not look forward, it fixates on past grievances. It does not seek a resolution to the litany of problems facing Palestinians; it seeks to exacerbate them to fuel global rage against Israel.

Because, as I keep banging away on, it is a movement that is “pro-Palestinian” in name only. Its only goal is to oppose and attack Israel.

Go to the BDS website and you can find lists of Israeli products and businesses to boycott. (A tool like this works both ways: You can use it as a handy shopping list.)

Note that these are not only Jewish products and businesses from Judea and Samaria (also known as the West Bank), but products and businesses in Israel proper. This is key. BDS activists in Europe, North America, and elsewhere go to stores and place stickers on Israeli-made products urging others not buy them, an act deeply redolent of the way Stars of David were painted on Jewish stores to instigate boycotts a couple of generations ago.

But they do not differentiate between products from the disputed territories between Israel and the Palestinians, and those from Israel — which is a sign that they do not make much effort to discern between the right of Palestinians to self-determination and the desire to wipe Israel from the map. But anyways.

Even if we do not care about Israelis, we should oppose BDS because it harms Palestinians.

When we support the BDS movement, we betray Palestinians in the name of helping them. Isolating Palestinians from the most successful entity in the Middle East — the (Jewish) State of Israel — is self-defeating.

This is challenging ideological terrain (if you are an idiot). Many Palestinians want Western allies to boycott Israel. In most cases, “progressive” Western allies should be guided by the will of the people we claim to ally with.

But Palestinians — partly due to the motives of the Arab world, partly by the complicity of their own leaders, and partly because they have been indoctrinated with genocidal Jew-hatred for generations — have swallowed an ideological bathwater of self-defeat.

True, it is counter to the received “progressive” dictum that a comfortable Canadian like me should be telling Palestinians that they are wrong to reject an Israeli olive branch. Who am I, or any other non-Palestinian, to tell them they should make peace and their lives would be better? What an imperialist bigot! (Haha.)

The Palestinian-American historian Rashid Khalidi wrote that colonizers “always claim that they will leave the native population better off as a result of their rule.” Zionists, of course, are not colonizers, they are decolonizers, but his point is taken: Zionism, from its inception, has included a strain which contends that the Arabs of the Levant would be better off as a result of the Zionist enterprise. (Look, I am doing it now!)

This may be paternalistic, condescending, and any number of other things.

But it is also true.

You can either live successfully, in peace, with adequate food and security for your children, or you can live a life of violence, poverty, and ideological purity. Palestinians have overwhelmingly chosen the latter package.

Prior to 1948, the Zionists cleared swamps, thereby massively reducing malaria, and built other infrastructures like hospitals and universities. The benefits redounded not only to Jews.

Muslim life expectancy in British-era Palestine skyrocketed from 37.5 years in 1927 to 50 in 1944. Child mortality plummeted, “reduced by 34 percent in the first year of age, by 31 percent in the second, by 57 percent in the third, by 64 percent in the fourth, and by 67 percent in the fifth” — according to Israeli historian Ephraim Karsh.¹

He wrote:

“That nothing remotely akin to this was taking place in the neighboring British-ruled Arab countries, not to mention India, can be explained only by the decisive Jewish contribution to (British-era) Palestine’s socioeconomic well-being.”

It was the extraordinary tangible — even literally lifesaving — advances brought to the region by the Jewish pioneers that drew many Arabs from elsewhere in the region to this specific area.

Between 1920 and 1936, its Arab population rose from about 600,000 to 950,000 owing to the substantial improvement in socioeconomic conditions attending the development of the Jewish National Home,” according to Karsh. Note that this 50-percent increase in Arab population kind of undermines the Palestinian indigeneity narrative. Some Palestinian families had been there for decades. Others just showed up.

But self-interest does not always trump national chauvinism, as the Palestinian movement has shown from its beginnings until today. The Peel Commission of 1937 acknowledged that the Arabs’ tendency to never miss an opportunity began early.

“Though the Arabs have benefited by the development of the country owing to Jewish immigration, this has had no conciliatory effect,” said the report. “On the contrary … with almost mathematical precision the betterment of the economic situation in Palestine meant the deterioration of the political situation.”

The Palestinians’ stubborn refusal to cooperate or coexist has led to a situation where they sit next to, but hopelessly apart from, one of the world’s greatest economic, technological, scientific, and cultural powerhouses. Were its neighbors prepared to coexist with Israel, they would benefit from the extraordinary dynamo next door. This is true for Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and others in the region. But it is especially true for Palestinians.

“Denormalization,” the theory and practice of isolating Israel in its region, has done nothing to stanch Israel’s development as the foremost economy and freest society in the region. But it has impoverished Palestinians.

Denormalization is inconvenient for Israel — one can only imagine the achievements the country would have realized had it not been under constant threat of violence and elimination  — but for Palestinians it is economically devastating.

Denormalization has also backed the Palestinians into a diplomatic corner from which they are unlikely to extricate themselves. By demonizing Israel, the Palestinian narrative has made compromise all but impossible. One cannot deal with the devil and maintain one’s legitimacy. And since compromise and negotiation are the sole route to Palestinian statehood and self-determination, they have created a Catch-22.

The effect this has had on Israelis is tragic. It has required successive defensive wars, decades of terrorism, and atrocities like October 7th.

For Palestinians, this mania to boycott Israel and ghettoize themselves from the advantages that peace and coexistence would bring have resulted in generations of hopelessness, failure and, as we see in the current war, mayhem and death.

There are terms for people like this — but “pro-Palestinian” doesn’t seem like one of them.

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1. Karsh, Ephraim. “Palestine Betrayed.” Yale University Press. 2011.