From Segregation To Integration: Overcoming The Boycott’s Damage To Arab Interests
You wouldn’t know it from the hateful propaganda that has become so effusive on college campuses lately, but successive boycotts of Israel and its people have strengthened both while doing great harm to Arab countries, not least to the Palestinian people. It’s time to move forward to a post-boycott era in the interests of all the peoples of the region.
The boycott of Israel and its people has evolved in stages over time. It began in the mid-twentieth century, when Arab elites enacted discriminatory and exclusionary policies against 900,000 Jews indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa. The venture culminated in their mass dispossession and forced migration. The boycott then developed into an Arab intergovernmental effort to target the young country to which most of these Jews fled—the state of Israel—through political, cultural, and economic isolation aiming to uproot them and their European Jewish brethren from the area. The third iteration was a societal ban on all forms of civil engagement with Israelis, even and especially in countries where a peace between governments had been established.
This boycott, too, has since begun to fade, as a rising tide of Arab youth seek to engage their Israeli neighbors. Yet now a fourth iteration of the boycott has emerged, this time driven largely by foreigners. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement brings together Islamist, far-left, and hardline Palestinian elites — primarily in Europe and the Americas — in a campaign to drive a cultural and economic wedge between Israelis and their global partners.
Some consistent patterns run through all of this history. On the one hand, the boycott not only failed to defeat Israel and its people but also inspired them to innovate responses that invigorated the Israeli economy and society. . At the same time, the boycott has harmed Arab societies and economies. Meanwhile the boycott’s techniques spread to other conflicts within Arab societies, hardening sectarian attitudes and increasing intra-communal divisions, and thereby contributed to the disintegration of fractured nationstates including Yemen, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Furthermore, the boycott effectively isolated Palestinians within the West Bank and Gaza from the region: While hardline “resistance” factions enjoyed support from numerous powers, those Palestinians waging the just cause of institution building for a future state could hardly find Arab partners. Nor could they work hand in hand with Israelis in engaging the region — a role which would have empowered them economically.
The cause of rebuilding and revitalizing the region calls for a break with this tragic history: We must work to overcome the boycott, for the benefit of all — moving from a mindset of segregation to a policy of integration.
But how? Let us begin with an operationally minded distillation of the problem by reviewing the boycott’s depth and expanse, the means of its spread, and the state of efforts to roll it back. Once we better understand these dynamics, we can plot a way to reverse-engineer them. So, for example, since the boycott developed through mass communication and political pressure, first in Arabic and then in other languages, we must confront it through a campaign of corrective communications and public outreach—in all of the same languages, beginning with Arabic.
Since the culture of the boycott swelled from the Arab region to much of the world, the Arab response must be similarly global.
Since Islamists, the far Left, and hardline Palestinian factions have congealed into a coalition, Arabs for integration need to build a coalition from constituencies that are larger and potentially stronger.
And given that present-day efforts to challenge the boycott rarely reach Arab societies and are all but silent about the boycott’s toll on Arabs, we particularly must fill these gaps.
The premises inform a new campaign for a post-boycott region. That campaign would:
Wage Arab media outreach: Within the Middle East and North Africa, we must use all the technological means available to launch a communications campaign that lays out vividly the human and economic toll of the boycott on Arabs generally.
Wage Western media outreach: We must convey a special message to international audiences: While BDS activists strive to move the region backward toward segregation, a rising tide of progressive Arab youth want to move forward toward integration.
Model a post-boycott region: Drawing inspiration from the peaceful civil rights campaigns in the mid-20th-century American South, we must organize public activities to breach the boycott. These would include Arab and Israeli academic exchange in their respective universities’ conferences; cultural collaborations such as joint Arab-Israeli film productions; and bold new private sector partnerships, all occurring in the light of day. We would, similarly, challenge segregationist laws in several Arab countries that have instituted draconian legislation prescribing years in prison for merely meeting an Israeli citizen.
Model a post-boycott world: In some Western countries, BDS elements have tried to use the democratic process to force governments and businesses to comply with the boycott, in some cases as a matter of criminal law. We must organize a multi-pronged sector-by-sector project of testimony and advocacy for integration in Arab and Western legislatures, professional guilds, and the halls of decision-making.
Pursue teachable moments at public assemblies: Though BDS demonstrators advocate an agenda harmful to Arab interests, the presence of some Arabs among them creates the false impression that it is a “pro-Arab” movement. We must challenge this distortion by making our own voices heard.
Rebuilding and revitalizing the region requires an irrevocable break with the failed history of boycotting. We must transform the mindset of segregation into one of integration. We must define and then work to construct a project to transition to a “Post-Boycott Middle East.” PBME must replace BDS in full, so that the benefits of partnership can finally supplant the ravages of exclusion.