Remembering the Failure of the Arab League Blacklist - by Mitchell Bard

Today, most people are unaware that the Arab boycott still exists, though few Arab countries enforce it and several Gulf states now have discrete economic relations with Israel. The lesson is that Israel has grown and thrived for almost 62 years despite a boycott which, at one time, was applied to thousands of companies around the world; it is not going to be destroyed by the BDS movement, even with the support of the UN and the blacklisting of a relative handful of companies.

Mitchell Bard..
Algemeiner..
19 February '20..

The UN Human Rights Council (HRC) has just published a database of companies operating in Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem. The intention is to create a blacklist of companies that can be targeted for boycotting.

The HRC’s action is outrageous and deserves condemnation, but hysteria is unwarranted. The BDS movement’s campaign to destroy Israel will fail. To understand why, let’s recall the history of the Arab League boycott.

Like the BDS movement, the Arab League boycott was fundamentally antisemitic. We know this because it was instituted in 1945 before the establishment of Israel, and because it explicitly said that “Jewish products and manufactured goods shall be considered undesirable to the Arab countries.” All Arab “institutions, organizations, merchants, commission agents, and individuals” were called upon “to refuse to deal in, distribute, or consume Zionist products or manufactured goods.” As in the case of BDS, the terms “Jewish” and “Zionist” were used synonymously.

Today, some members of Congress are resisting legislation targeting the BDS movement, but as far back as 1959, the Senate adopted an amendment opposing foreign aid to countries that discriminate against Americans on the grounds of religion. The primary motivation for this and other early legislative efforts was the Arabs’ policy of refusing visas to American Jews and, more specifically, the Saudis’ refusal to permit Jews to be stationed at the United States’ base at Dhahran.

In 1960, Congress adopted the Douglas-Keating “Freedom of the Seas” amendment, which said “the peace of the world is endangered” when nations receiving US aid “wage economic warfare against other nations assisted under the Act; including such procedures as boycotts, blockades, and the restriction of the use of international waterways.” Five years later, Congress adopted a broader regulation that held that US policy opposed “restrictive trade practices or boycotts fostered or imposed by countries against other countries friendly to the United States.”

Israel and its allies are justifiably upset that the HRC released a blacklist of 112 companies. This is trivial, however, compared to the scale of the Arab League blacklist.

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Mitchell Bard is Executive Director of AICE and Jewish Virtual Library.