This is explicitly stated in the law itself. Boycotts are unlawful if they are directed against the State of Israel -- not, for example, by the State of Israel against some other state. No Israeli in his right mind would retroactively condemn the boycott imposed by world Jewry on Germany immediately after the Nazis came to power -- a boycott that served as a pretext for Josef Goebbels when he unleashed on April 1, 1933, the first Nazi anti-Semitic boycott ("Deutsche wehrt euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!")
Nor does any upright Zionist find fault with the boycott measures passed by Congress, under intense Jewish pressure, against the late Soviet Union, in order to break down the barriers to free Jewish emigration. These measures were hugely successful.
No less successful was the worldwide boycott against the Apartheid regime in South Africa -- a boycott warmly welcomed by the South African liberation movement, though it also hurt the African workers employed by the boycotted white businesses (an argument now repeated by Israeli settlers, who exploit Palestinian laborers for starvation wages).
So political boycotts are not wrong, as long as they are directed against others. It's the old "Hottentot morality" of colonial lore -- "if I steal your cow, that's right. If you steal my cow, that's wrong."
Rightists can call for action against left-wing organizations. Leftists cannot call for action against right-wing organizations. It's as simple as that.
BUT THE law is not only anti-democratic and discriminatory, it is also blatantly annexationist.
By a simple semantic trick, in less than a sentence, the lawmakers do what successive Israeli governments did not dare to do: they annex the Palestinian occupied territories to Israel.
Or maybe it's the other way round: are the settlers annexing Israel? The word "settlements" does not appear in the text. God forbid. Much as the word "Arabs" does not appear in any of the other laws.
Instead, the text simply states that calls for the boycott of Israel, which are forbidden by the law, include the boycott of Israeli institutions and enterprises in all territories controlled by Israel. This includes, of course, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
This is the core of the matter. Everything else is camouflage.
The initiators want to silence our call for boycotting the settlements, which is gathering momentum throughout the world.
THE IRONY of the matter is that they may achieve the exact opposite.
When we started the boycott, our stated objective was to draw a clear line between Israel in its recognized borders -- the Green Line -- and the settlements. We do not advocate a boycott of the State of Israel which, we believe, sends the wrong message and pushes the Israeli center into the waiting arms of the extreme right ("The whole world is against us!") A boycott of the settlements, we think, helps to re-institute the Green Line and make a clear distinction.
This law does the exact opposite. By wiping out the line between the State of Israel and the settlements, it plays into the hands of those who call for a boycott of Israel in the belief (mistaken, I think) that a unified Apartheid state would pave the way for a democratic future.
Recently, the folly of the law was demonstrated by a French judge in Grenoble. This incident concerned the quasi-monopolistic Israeli export company for agricultural products, Agrexco. The judge suspected the company of fraud, because products of the settlements were falsely declared as coming from Israel. This could well be fraud, too, because Israeli exports to Europe are entitled to preferential treatment which the products of the settlements are not.
Such incidents are occurring more and more often in various European countries. This law will cause them to multiply.
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