The topic of a boycott on Israel is considered one of the most explosive and sensitive in Israeli society. Until recently, only the farthest extreme of the post-Zionist left even considered supporting or calling on the world to boycott settlement products or even the State of Israel itself, in response to the continuation of the occupation. All these years, the vast majority in Israeli society has been unified around the outright opposition to boycotts of any kind, certainly a boycott on Israel. The call for a boycott was the province of a handful of extreme leftist professors and several ephemeral organizations on the extreme left such as “Gush Shalom,” which joined forces with the Arab-Israeli Knesset members. All of them together are perceived as detached from reality and lacking any relevance to Israeli society and its political map. They work in the margins, without any real influence on what’s happening in the country.
Personally, for all these years, I vehemently opposed the various calls to boycott Israel. I considered organizations that contributed or called for such boycotts loathsome. I also considered and still consider Israeli organizations (mostly Arab) that worked to put Israel Defense Forces officers on trial abroad especially despicable.
Imagine for yourselves that in Britain, or the United States or France, British, US or French organizations would work to collect personal information on officers and combatants of that country and pass this information to external prosecutors and call on them to arrest those officers and combatants and put them on trial for their activities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Mali, Libya or any other place on earth.
Imagine for yourselves that a US organization would expose the personal information of the members of the special forces unit that killed Osama bin Laden, and call to arrest them and put them on trial for war crimes. What’s more, in Israel’s case, its fighters aren’t working in far-off lands, but defending the country itself, the right of its citizens to live in security.
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