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BDS on a Roll? Not So Fast

(Commentary) Evelyn Gordon - Last week, Britain's Supreme Court issued a major ruling against BDS when it upheld a trespassing conviction against four activists who chained themselves in an Ahava shop in London to protest the Israeli cosmetics firm's West Bank plant. The court rejected the claim that Ahava was "aiding and abetting the transfer of Israeli citizens to the OPT [Occupied Palestinian Territories]," and thereby violating the Geneva Convention. The company was doing no such thing, the court said. The court also rejected the claim that Ahava had mislabeled its goods by labeling them "made in Israel" when they were made in the West Bank - another precedent of obvious value. The label isn't misleading, it said, because "a consumer willing to buy Israeli products would be very unlikely not to buy Israeli products because they were produced in the OPT." In short, the court understood that most boycotters aren't just "anti-occupation"; they have a problem with Israel, period. That understanding is crucial to unmasking BDS for what it is. Two weeks earlier, BDS suffered another loss in a French court. The French distributor for the Israeli firm SodaStream, which also has a West Bank plant, had sued a local pro-boycott group for claiming that SodaStream products were being sold fraudulently because they were labeled "made in Israel." The court found the claim that the distributor was deceiving customers to be baseless. Moreover, many recent BDS "victories" are actually optical illusions. Take the announcement by Denmark's largest bank that it's divesting from Bank Hapoalim. As Hapoalim pointed out, "Denmark's Danske Bank has no investments, of any kind, with Bank Hapoalim."
2014-02-14 00:00:00
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