Arab Spring, Israeli Winter

In April 2002, in the thick of the bloody intifada, Germany and Belgium suspended military sales to Israel. Norway boycotted some Israeli agricultural commodities. The Danish Workers Union followed suit. The European parliament called to suspend Israel's Association Agreement with the E.U. Though Belgium supported this move, harsher steps were avoided so as to allow Colin Powell, then U.S. Secretary of State, to proceed with his peace mission to the Middle East.

Israel has been subjected to boycotts and embargoes before. In the first four decades of Israel's existence as well as in the last five years, the Arabs imposed strict market access penalties on investors and trade partners of the Jewish state. The U.S. threatened its would-be ally with economic and military sanctions after the Suez War in 1956, forcing it to return to Egypt its territorial gains in the desert campaign.

For well over a decade afterwards, Israel was barred from direct purchases of American weaponry, securing materiel through West German intermediaries and from France. After the Six Day War, French President Charles de Gaulle imposed an arms embargo on the country. Faced with Arab intransigence and virulent enmity towards Israel in the Khartoum Summit in 1967, the U.S. stepped in and has since become Israel's largest military supplier and staunchest geopolitical supporter.

Yet, even this loyal ally, the United States, has come close to imposing sanctions on Israel on a few occasions.

In 1991, Yitzhak Shamir, the Israeli Prime Minister at the time, was reluctantly dragged into the Madrid Arab-Israeli peace conference by a victorious post Gulf war administration. He proceeded to negotiate in bad faith and continued the aggressive settlement policies of his predecessors.

In consequence, a year later, President George H.W. Bush, the incumbent's father, withheld $10 billion in sorely needed loan guarantees, intended to bankroll the housing of one million Jewish immigrants from the imploding Soviet Bloc. Shamir's successor, Yitzhak Rabin, succumbed to American demands, froze all new settlements and regained the coveted collateral.

Only concerted action by the E.U. and the U.S. can render a sanctions regime effective. Israel is the recipient of $2.7 billion in American annual military aid and economic assistance. In the wake of this round of fighting in the Gulf, it will benefit from $10 billion in guaranteed soft loans. It has signed numerous bilateral tax, trade and investment treaties with the United States. American sanctions combined with European ones may prove onerous.

Israel is also finding itself increasingly on the wrong side of the "social investing" fence. Activist and non-governmental organisations are applying overt pressure to institutional investors, such as pension funds and universities, to divest or to refrain from ploughing their cash into Israeli enterprises due to the country's "apartheid" policies and rampant and repeated violations of human rights and international law. They are joined by student bodies, academics, media people and conscientious Jews the world over.

According to The Australian, a petition launched in 2002 by John Docker, a Jewish-Australian author and Fellow of the Australian National University's Humanities Research Centre, Christian Lebanese Australian Senior Lecturer, and author Ghassan Hage of Sydney University's Anthropology Department: “calls [for a] ban on joint research programs with Israeli universities, attending conferences in Israel and disclosing information to Israeli academics". It is one of many such initiatives. In the long run such grassroots efforts may prove to be have the most devastating effects on Israel's fragile and recessionary economy. Multinationals are far more sensitive to global public opinion than they used to be only a decade ago. So are governments and privatised academic institutions.

Israel may find itself ostracised by consent rather than by decree. Already apariah state in many quarters, it is being fingered by European left-leaning intellectuals as being in cahoots with the lunatic fringes of Christian and Jewish fundamentalism. Yet, if sanctions cause a recalcitrant Israeli right to trade occupied land for a hitherto elusive peace, history may yet judge them to be a blessing in disguise.

Appendix: The U.S.A, the Friendly Bully

I. Introduction