Last week, Morocco became the fourth Arab state – after the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Sudan – to conclude a peace agreement with Israel. The US-brokered Abraham Accords will almost certainly be remembered as Team Trump’s greatest overseas achievement. Among the hitherto unappreciated benefits, the accords will completely delegitimize those in the West who seek to delegitimize Israel, not least the movement to boycott, repulse and punish the Jewish state.
If you asked pro-Israel thinkers and activists a decade ago to name the greatest threats to the Jewish state, a nuclear Iran would undoubtedly top the list – but BDS and delegitimization in general would come second.
No, BDSers could not commit massive violence against Israel like the Tehran regime or its terror providers could. At the time, and still are, these moves were mostly confined to the crazy confines of the college campus. On the other hand, as the recent, explosive arrival of critical theory on the national stages shows, what’s prevailing in the Queer and Grievance Studies departments doesn’t stay there. Pro-Israeli types were right when they were concerned.
Israel’s fear – and the BDS ‘goal – was that around 1985 the Jewish state would become something like South Africa, an internationally hated and widely sanctioned pariah. This is indeed why anti-Israel activists often used the rhetoric of “apartheid”. It is unfair and ahistoric to compare Israel to that grotesque racial regime, but honesty and historical sincerity are not exactly the hallmarks of the haters of the Jewish state.
The BDSers achieved a degree of success, especially in Europe. Performers often canceled concerts in Israel under pressure from BDS – and sometimes led the way, as in the case of the likes of Tilda Swinton, Roger Waters and Chris Martin of Coldplay. European theaters would refuse to host Jewish (even Israeli) film festivals, even though BDS people ridiculously claimed their movement is not anti-Semitic. Western universities or separate departments would set up Israeli academic boycotts. Last year, perhaps the most alarming step, the European Court of Justice ruled that EU states should label products in the West Bank as “made in settlements”.
Has the Israeli economy ever been in grave danger? Probably not. Europe remains the Jewish state’s largest trading partner, although boycotts and labeling could bite if extended to companies operating in Israel or Palestinian territories. The real danger, however, was moral-political. If BDS were to succeed, Israel would be permanently given the status of an abnormal country, rather than a normal part of the Middle East map. That would demoralize the Israeli people and exacerbate the hostility they already face in global forums such as the United Nations.
Well, so much for all that. Today, a little over a year since the EU labeling decision, you can find Israeli products – prominently displayed, sometimes with Israeli flags to promote them – on supermarket shelves in the United Arab Emirates.
How far can BDS go in a world where once sworn enemies of the Jewish state enjoy Israeli citrus products and countless cultural exchanges? Who exactly do the Western champions of the Arabs represent when the Arabs themselves want to live peacefully alongside Israel and accept the fundamental legitimacy of the Jewish state? Isn’t it more than a little condescending for, say, Roger Waters – hometown: Great Bookham, Surrey, England – to tell the Arabs who they can do business with?
To be clear, I’m not suggesting BDS will go away tomorrow. The rest of the Arab world is making peace with Israel, but Palestinian leaders are not about to accept what is admittedly a very nice debt: billions of dollars in international aid in return for refusing to accept reality. BDS helps give their rejection a layer of global credibility. And avid college professors and students can always use “anti-Zionism” to mask old-fashioned hatred, choosing only one state and only one state – which happens to be Jewish – as shame.
But the fact remains that the Abraham Accords revealed a silly side of the BDS movement: for God’s sake, when Sudan, once one of the world’s most virulent anti-Israel states, made peace with Jerusalem, BDS looks like a boutique for leftist nobility, the kind that put their pronouns in their Twitter biographies. The real world – and the Middle East – just moved.
Sohrab Ahmari is The Post’s opinion maker. Twitter: @SohrabAhmari