#BDS_Fail: Threats to boycott Israel are nothing but a bluff
"The boycott is being used like a bogeyman, a scary story you tell a child at night," said Jonathan Medved, CEO of OurCrowd, a crowdfunding platform looking to provide venture capital to Israeli companies.
BDS is a failure everywhere. Yes, even in the EU.
"The truth is that Israel is a world leader in water technology, next-generation agriculture, cybersecurity, healthcare innovation and start-ups. What sane person is going to walk away from that?" he said, speaking by telephone during a visit to South Africa to seek out potential partners.
EU diplomats say business with firms operating in the settlements, such as skincare company Ahava, represent less than 1 percent of all Israeli-EU trade, which last year totaled $36.7 billion, up from $20.9 billion a decade earlier.
The European Union matters because it is Israel's largest trading partner and it is the only place where murmurings of sanctions have so far been raised outside the Arab world, where only Egypt and Jordan have formal ties with Israel.
However, Europe is not united on how to deal with Israel and has not yet even agreed to introduce EU-wide labeling to make clear if goods come from settlements, much less anything more radical along the lines suggested by Lapid.
"There is no EU boycott," the president of the European parliament, Martin Schultz, said this month during a visit to Jerusalem during which he questioned whether the 28-nation bloc would want to penalize Israel if the U.S.-backed talks failed.
EU governments say it is up to each firm to decide its own investment strategy.
While a handful of states, including Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, discourage links with the settlements, there are no consequences for ignoring that steer, beyond the "potential reputational implications" a British Foreign Office agency warns of on its website.
Schultz said he was "not convinced about economic pressure", and also cast doubt on the need for clear labeling of settlement goods that would allow consumers to chose.
"Does it carry such a large weight that it could really change something?" he asked reporters.
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However, divestment moves by the likes of Danske Bank appear to be the exception rather than the norm.
Germany's biggest lender Deutsche Bank AG denied reports last week that it was set to boycott Israeli banks, while the giant Dutch pension fund ABP announced this month that after a review, it saw no need to cut ties with Israeli banks.
All the while, foreign firms continue to pour into Israel. According to the latest Bank of Israel data, direct investment was $10.51 billion in the first nine months of 2013, up from $9.5 billion for the whole of 2012. Exports to Europe rose 6.3 percent last year.
And as those videos keep pointing out, you can't really boycott Israel, even if you want to.
Global brands such as Google, Cisco, Microsoft, Twitter, Apple, AOL and Facebook have all invested in Israel, so, like it or not, users of computers, smartphones and apps could well be supporting Israeli engineering.
"All the talk about boycotts has not so far caused any damage to our economy," Uriel Lynn, president of the Israeli Chambers of Commerce, told Reuters.
"Israel has gone through much harsher boycotts in the past. For example, we did not have commercial relations with China for years, and for a time we could only buy crude oil from Mexico and Egypt. So we can definitely withstand boycotts."
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Labels: BDS, boycott Israel, Buycott Israel, European anti-Semitism
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:09 AM
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