Naomi Klein, a new leader in the global boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel, is determined to get traction.
Her recent, eloquent speech in Ramallah on the subject deserves wide support:
So one of the things that we are doing here with BDS is we’re creating another pressure in the Israeli economy that actually does want peace. We are challenging the idea of normalization because when a film that you really want to see isn’t playing in the Jerusalem film festival; when a conference you wanted to go to isn’t going to happen in Tel Aviv because people have decided that they are not going to have it there – that challenges such a central part of Israeli identity. On the other hand, you are going to have more and more companies that are going to go to [the] Israel[i] [government] – and this is what happened in the South African context – and they are going to say what the South African businesses said […] finally in the late 1980s: “Look! You’ve got to make this stop.” That’s what they said to the De Klerk government. “We can’t take it anymore. We can’t take this BDS campaign. It’s starting to hurt our bottom line.”