(BESA Center for Strategic Studies-Bar-Ilan University) Ofira Seliktar and Farhad Rezaei - Iran's Majlis recently passed a law that seeks to criminalize all interaction with the "Zionist enemy." The ban covers all commercial, academic, and cultural activities, and criminalizes all indirect forms of interaction as well. Included in the ban are hardware and software developed in Israel or by companies that have production branches in Israel. This provision will be daunting to implement, since many IT giants, including IBM, Apple, and Google, have research facilities in Israel. Check Point, Mobileye, and numerous other platforms that were developed in Israel are used in many software products. Should Iran actually apply this clause of the law, it will end up in the digital equivalent of the Stone Age. Organizers of anti-Israel events at which Israeli flags are routinely burned complained that because the bill outlaws the manufacture of Israeli flags, they will now be forced to import these items. Ofira Seliktar is professor emerita at Gratz College in Pennsylvania. Farhad Rezaei teaches political science at York University in Toronto.
2020-06-11 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive