Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has pushed the plight of the Palestinian people to the forefront of global attention. For more than two years, the world has witnessed the mass killing, disease and starvation imposed upon the enclave by Israel.
Faced with a sense of helplessness, calls have grown for boycotts of Israeli goods, for companies profiting from Israel or its settlements in the occupied West Bank to divest, and for politicians to expand sanctions that some have already imposed on Israeli ministers.
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However, with other world events, such as the war in Ukraine and the United States’s face-off with Iran now dominating much of the world’s headlines, the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement faces a challenge to keep attention on Gaza and Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine.
Gains made
The war on Gaza has led to Israel facing unprecedented condemnation from around the world.
Israel has moved closer to pariah status for its attacks not just in Gaza – killing more than 70,000 Palestinians – but in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East.
The country’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant now find themselves facing International Criminal Court arrest warrants for war crimes.
At home, at least two of Israel’s far-right government ministers, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, have also been sanctioned by governments worldwide.
And on top of that hangs the judgement of the International Court of Justice in January 2024, that the state of Israel may plausibly be engaged in genocide, in an ongoing case brought by South Africa.
Criticism of Israel has also entered the mainstream culturally in Western countries, particularly among young people horrified by the death rained upon Gaza.
And importantly, there have been economic consequences for Israel and some of those doing business in it – echoing the boycott movement against apartheid South Africa in the 1980s.
Companies such as the French supermarket chain Carrefour were forced to close a number of outlets in the Middle East amid public anger over its links to Israeli firms operating in illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Other companies associated with Israel’s actions, including Airbnb – which allows Israelis in illegal settlements to rent their properties – and Microsoft, whose Azure cloud services have supported the Israeli military, have all faced internal dissent and reputational damage because of their ties to the Israeli government.
As a consequence of public pressure, pension funds from around the world, including Spain, Norway, Denmark, France and Ireland, have divested from Israeli assets linked to settlements, or withdrawn investments from companies tied to Israel.
“BDS and boycotts have changed Israel’s global trade landscape,” Avi Balashnikov, chairman of the Israel Export Institute, conceded in September 2024.
“We fight every day, hour by hour, for Israeli industry abroad,” he added. “Economic boycotts and BDS organisations present major challenges, and in some countries, we are forced to operate under the radar.”
Moving spotlight
Despite a US-brokered “ceasefire“, Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed more than 500 people since the agreement was reached in October, including at least 31 on Saturday. The fact that Israel has continued to kill Palestinians, while much of the world looks away, highlights the difficulty now facing the BDS movement and whether it can maintain the energy it has gained.
“It is not uncommon for the observance of a boycott to rise and fall according to the prominence of an issue and success of specific campaigns to raise awareness or promote adherence to the boycott,” Nick Cull, a historian and authority on cultural boycotts at the University of Southern California, told Al Jazeera.
“I think that the power of a boycott is cumulative,” Cull continued. “Just as advertising associates a brand with good feelings and positive experiences – think how over many decades Coca-Cola link their drink to ideas of friendship – as part of the ‘buy-me’ message, so a boycott’s ‘don’t buy’ message becomes a negative branding associating a product and its place of origin with negative feelings: training a revulsion impulse rather than a logical inner debate over the merits of a particu