So It's Apartheid, What About the Sanctions?

Bibi uses BDS the same way he uses Hamas - as the perfect foil

photo: New York Times

Three years ago I went on a two-week academic junket around Israel. A sort of Birthright for professors, it was a soft propaganda effort to promote, in the bland language of such things, a better understanding of the country. But the main feeling I left with was queasy resignation. The Israeli left seemed to be dying a slow death; a one-state solution seemed impossible and a two-state solution increasingly impractical.

Most of the people we met were eloquent cynics who did not seem perturbed by the situation (including one who praised the youthful reformer Mohammed bin Salman). As I wrote on Twitter back then, “the government appears satisfied with the status quo: intensifying apartheid, crackdown on dissent, all with a total lack of response or pressure from the U.S.”

In 2018 I was using the term “apartheid” in a descriptive sense, not as a political slogan, because it seemed pretty clear that the treatment of Palestinians differed in significant ways from the treatment of Israeli Jews in ways that were institutionally perpetuated. I am happy to see that this time the term has entered into mainstream discourse, not just from usual suspects like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez but also from the UN, Human Rights Watch and even, gasp, major US networks.

Once the language of apartheid is accepted, talk of sanctions cannot be far behind, right? Well, here emerges the big difference with South Africa, and one that I think benefits Israel. Even as Israel becomes a fully apartheid state, the global movement to sanction it remains hobbled by association with antisemitism. BDS is, how shall I put it, problematic when it comes to such things, making it harder for mainstream groups or politicians to join in.

But another problem is that the goals embraced by BDS — boycotts of Israeli companies — just doesn’t work very well. As the New York Times wrote in 2019:

Despite scattered pullouts from Israel by some companies, foreign direct investment in Israel is at an all-time high. Israel’s economy is well-suited to resist boycotts because it is less dependent on exports of commodities, which can be sourced elsewhere, than on sales of intellectual property, like software, and business-to-business products, against which it is harder to mobilize consumers. And while Ireland advanced legislation to ban imports of goods produced by Israeli settlements on the West Bank last year, the B.D.S. movement acknowledges that few foreign governments have imposed sanctions on Israel.

In economic terms, BDS has cornered the market in anti-Israel sanctions, but it makes a terrible product. What is really needed here, if you want to influence Israel’s behavior, is not broad boycotts but targeted sanctions, Magnitsky-style, against members of the Israeli government and military.

The elegance of targeted sanctions, as we know from cases like Russia, is that they make it harder for leaders to use them as political footballs. Putin cannot claim that sanctions against oligarchs are “anti-Russian” precisely because they target the same people that most Russians dislike too. Similarly, it’s harder to accuse sanctioners of being anti-semitic when they target specific individuals rather then groups, for specific and documented contraventions of international law.

Targeted sanctions are the precision-guided weapons of economic statecraft. Broad boycotts of the kind supported by BDS are, instead, indiscriminate bombing runs — and it is for this reason, perversely, that Bibi benefits from BDS. There are of course many reasons besides BDS why Israel is less politically isolated than South Africa was. But so long as the default option for sanctioning Israel is a questionable organization with unrealistic policy goals, this benefits the government.

Despite some media reports, the Israel-Palestine conflict is not the result of some eternal law of nature but the product of conscious choices by self interested politicians. In this case, it was Bibi gambling for escalation to stay in office — with Hamas eagerly taking him up on the offer, because they too want to maintain the status quo, and have entered into a sick co-dependency with their sworn enemy. Bibi needs BDS for the same reason he needs Hamas — as the perfect foil to justify his actions and keep the West on his side.

Ironically we at the University of Toronto are having the same issue playing out on a much smaller scale. A few weeks ago our school was sanctioned because a donor interfered with the hiring of a pro-Palestinian academic. You might have even seen a New Yorker story about it, quoting some of my colleagues. It appears to be a serious breach of academic freedom, and belies recent pronouncements from the Right that academia is pro-Palestinian by default.

The rare sanction from CAUT implies a boycott of the entire university — no one from the outside should visit, give talks, accept job offers, etc. It is the academic equivalent of broad-based sanctions. In essence, our grad students are being denied opportunities because of shady actions by a donor and a dean. I think it’s unfair in a similar way that indiscriminate sanctions are unfair, in displacing the punishment down the ladder of responsibility. For that reason I think CAUT’s decision is a bad one, even though I think the people directly responsible should be punished.

But how does one apply targeted sanctions in this case? Fire the dean? Shame the donor? I understand why broad-based sanctions were the first instinct here — there are few points of pressure, and targeting the university as whole makes sense if you want to inflict reputational damage. But this is not the case for Israel, where the template for targeted sanctions is readily applicable.

Despite the Overton window shifting rapidly on this issue, it remains politically unfeasible for any Western leader to support Magnitsky-style sanctions against Israeli politicians. But that may change, and if it does, it will provide a welcome alternative to the current approach. Attempts to punish Israel’s apartheid will be stymied so long as BDS is the default vehicle for doing so. (There, a sentence that pisses off everyone.) Bibi knows this is the case, and benefits from the ability to conflate legitimate criticism with violent anti-Semitism. I hope another alternative emerges soon.