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Boycott threat should be a wake-up call to Israelis

While settlers are creating an almost irreversible reality in the occupied territories, even those opposing the idea of an international boycott on Israel might change their minds.
An Israeli woman from the left-wing peace group Gush Shalom, holds a sign with the Israeli and Palestinian flags over the backdrop of Jerusalem July 15. Some 50 Israeli demonstrators came to the village just outside of Jerusalem to show their support for a Palestinan capital in Jerusalem. Hundreds of Palestinians and Israelis demonstrated in a show of support for their leaders who are in the midst of Middle East peact talks aimed at securing a final peace deal by September.

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The topic of a boycott on Israel is considered one of the most explosive and sensitive in Israeli society. Until recently, only the farthest extreme of the post-Zionist left even considered supporting or calling on the world to boycott settlement products or even the State of Israel itself, in response to the continuation of the occupation. All these years, the vast majority in Israeli society has been unified around the outright opposition to boycotts of any kind, certainly a boycott on Israel. The call for a boycott was the province of a handful of extreme leftist professors and several ephemeral organizations on the extreme left such as “Gush Shalom,” which joined forces with the Arab-Israeli Knesset members. All of them together are perceived as detached from reality and lacking any relevance to Israeli society and its political map. They work in the margins, without any real influence on what’s happening in the country.

Personally, for all these years, I vehemently opposed the various calls to boycott Israel. I considered organizations that contributed or called for such boycotts loathsome. I also considered and still consider Israeli organizations (mostly Arab) that worked to put Israel Defense Forces officers on trial abroad especially despicable.

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