After decades of being dismissed as fringe, the boycott call has been taken up by leading figures across arts, sports and politics

For more than a decade Shouk offered an Israeli-inspired, plant-based and kosher menu in and around Washington. Last week the chain was forced to close the last of five locations and lay off the last of 30 staff. It said the war in Gaza had made it impossible to do business; activists claimed the restaurant appropriated Palestinian food and imported Israeli products.

“It didn’t let up: boycotts, harassment, you name it,” recalled Dennis Friedman, 46, a Jewish American who co-founded Shouk with Ran Nussbacher, who is Israeli. “The ability to continue to operate wasn’t there. I feel terrible because Shouk wasn’t a political place; Shouk was a place for people to come together. To become a target and be mislabelled and thrown into things that aren’t true is unfortunate.”

Shouk’s experience is not unique. Two years of humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza have fractured the consensus that once shielded Israel from significant international pressure. There are growing calls to shun Israeli and Israeli-adjacent businesses, ban the country from sporting and cultural events, and cut ties with its academic institutions. From stadiums to the high street, from concert halls to the political stage, the boycott movement is moving from the fringe to the mainstream.

While most of the voices in this article spoke before Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire, activists are vowing to keep up the pressure. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement criticised the plan to end the war as a “scheme primarily designed by Israel’s fascist government to save it from its unprecedented global isolation”, and called on civil society to step up its efforts.

two men smiles while wearing hoodies that read ‘shouk’
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Ran Nussbacher and Dennis Friedman, co-founders of Shouk, in Washington DC in 2019. Photograph: Laura Chase de Formigny for the Washington Post via Getty Images

Revulsion at Israel’s wartime conduct has mounted, as images of starving children emerged and the death toll exceeded 67,000 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Last month a team of independent experts commissioned by the UN’s human rights council concluded that Israel was committing genocide.

I don’t think that this is somehow in any way antisemitic or anti-Israel. It’s a rejection of … the Israeli government
Jeremy Ben-Ami
While criticism of Israeli policy is not new, the war in Gaza has acted as a catalyst, shattering taboos, emboldening dissent and pushing public and political sentiment into uncharted territory. Many observers see a turning point on the horizon – one that recalls the global campaign against apartheid in South Africa.

Jeremy Ben-Ami, president of J Street, a liberal pro-Israel advocacy group, said: “It’s as big a shift as I’ve seen in my life regarding attitudes not only in the American Jewish community but the public broadly.”

Ben-Ami added: “I don’t think that this is somehow in any way antisemitic or anti-Israel. It’s a rejection of this government and the policies of the Israeli government over not just the last couple of years but going back a few decades at this point.”

It is now 20 years since Palestinian civil society organisations called for BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) as a form of non-violent pressure on Israel, taking the South African anti-apartheid movement as their inspiration and calling for an end to Israel’s occupation and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes. BDS was reviled by conservatives and opposed by the Democratic presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Dozens of US states, red and blue, have passed laws over the years to penalize boycotts of Israel.

But a combination of generational change, revulsion at the events in Gaza and alienation caused by Benjamin Netanyahu’s extreme rightwing government is giving BDS new traction, even if many of the actions to target Israel are not formally taking place under the movement’s banner.

In May, 380 writers and organisations including Zadie Smith and Ian McEwan signed a letter stating that the war in Gaza is genocidal and calling for an immediate ceasefire, after an earlier letter from the literary community announcing a boycott of most Israeli cultural institutions. Last month more than 4,500 film workers, many from Hollywood, signed a pledge to boycott “complicit” Israeli film institutions and festivals.

Eurovision song contest organisers have said member countries will vote in November on whether Israel can participate next year. The event is hugely popular in Israel and its most recent victory – Toy by Netta Barzilai in 2018 – provoked wild celebrations on the streets of Tel Aviv.

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Israeli fans celebrate in Tel Aviv Israel after the Israeli singer Netta Barzilai won the Eurovision song contest on 13 May 2018. Photograph: Corinna Kern/Reuters

Dahlia Scheindlin, an Israeli analyst and pollster and visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, said a Eurovision boycott could make particularly big waves: “It is a cultural phenomenon in Israel. They love it. It’s seen as a total source of national pride that Israel participates and does a good job and has occasionally won. I don’t have a precedent for how Israel would react if they were kicked out.”

Elsewhere in the music world, hundreds of artists from Björk to Massive Attack have joined a call to block their music from being streamed in Israel.

The more isolated Israel gets, the more it realises the world is against its actions
Ashish Prashar
Then there is football. Fifa and Uefa, the sport’s governing bodies, are facing pressure to ban Israel from international competition. The former Manchester United star Eric Cantona has led calls for bodies to suspend Israel and for clubs to refuse to play Israeli teams.

Last month a billboard in New York’s Times Square displayed the message “Israel is committing genocide.” It was part of a campaign by Game Over Israel, which calls for a boycott of Israel’s national team, a boycott of Israeli clubs and a ban on Israeli players.

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Björk performs in Indio, California, on 23 April 2023. Photograph: Santiago Felipe/Getty Images for ABA
“Normalisation in an abnormal time of prolonged genocide is complicity,” said Ashish Prashar, one of the organisers. “As long as they step on our football pitches or appear at Eurovision, we are saying we are OK with occupation, we are OK with apartheid and we are OK with genocide.”

Boycott opponents argue that the efforts are counterproductive and target the innocent, with Israeli film workers and academics in particular arguing that boycotting them silences the country’s most critical voices.

But proponents say the isolation is the point. “The more isolated Israel gets, the more it realises the world is against its actions, the more its population realises the repercussions of its actions,” said Prashar, a former adviser to Tony Blair when he was Middle East envoy. “People will say to me, ‘Oh, is that collective punishment?’ What do you think Gaza is? Collective punishment is actually what’s happening in Gaza. We’re holding them accountable for committing these atrocities by isolating them.”

The South African precedent
The campaign against white minority rule in South Africa offers a historical touchstone and strategic playbook. The country was banned from the Olympics from 1964 onwards; Fifa expelled South Africa in 1976; cricket, rugby and tennis bodies followed, leading to almost total exclusion from big competitions.

The slogan “No normal sport in an abnormal society” became a rallying cry. Writers, musicians and artists were urged not to perform in South Africa or publish their work there. Consumers were urged to shun South African goods such as fruit, cigarettes and alcohol and complicit companies including Shell and Barclays.

I wrote back in 2009 that our South Africa moment was nearing. Now I think it’s much nearer than ever
Omar Barghouti
Jeremy Varon, a history professor who was active in the anti-apartheid divestment movement in the 1980s, recalled that liberation organisations inside South Africa “explicitly called for a cultural boycott”, which international allies then worked to enforce. The logic was “to isolate South Africa and South Africans on the world stage”, a key pressure point that played a “major role in the dooming of apartheid”.

Since the war broke out in Gaza, companies such as McDonald’s, Starbucks and Coca-Cola have faced boycotts because of their connections to Israel, while some Israeli-owned companies in the US have been targeted. In a speech last month, Netanyahu acknowledged his country’s growing economic isolation, urging Israel to become a “super Sparta” of the Middle East.

Omar Barghouti, a founder of the BDS movement and a recipient of the Gandhi peace award, said: “I wrote back in 2009 that our South Africa moment was nearing. Now I think it’s much nearer than ever because the BDS movement is beginning to affect policy. Netanyahu – and we – see the writing on the wall.”

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People march to Twickenham rugby ground where England were playing South Africa in London on 20 December 1969. Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images

Even before the war broke out, Barghouti noted, thousands of artists supported a cultural boycott of Israel, but now the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has seen a “drastic qualitative leap”.

“It’s no longer just the progressive artists joining the cultural boycotts; we’ve always had the Lauryn Hills and the Lordes and the more progressive artists, who are established and not in precarious situations where they would lose their career, though they took very courageous stances.

“But since the genocide, we’ve reached the ivory tower of Hollywood, the music industry, the fashion industry, famous chefs, makeup artists, major influencers, writers … We’ve never seen such traction before.”

There’s no question that there’s been a cultural shift. You can see it dramatically in public opinion
Peter Beinart
The South African comparison is not an entirely neat one, however. First, the anti-apartheid movement had a clear, unified political leadership in Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC), a structure the Palestinian movement currently lacks. Second, Israel is far more integrated into the global economy and technology sectors, making it significantly harder to isolate than South Africa was. While the cultural boycotts are symbolically significant and some countries have restricted arms sales and trade ties, it is not clear how much Israel’s economy has been affected. Haaretz recently reported that Europe’s spending on Israeli weapons was at a record high.

Third, Israel has powerful reservoirs of international support – from the US government to Christian Zionists and Jewish Americans – that create a buffer against isolation efforts. Fourth, Netanyahu has sympathy from fellow strongmen around the world, including Donald Trump.

The difference can be seen in the student movements of both efforts – when the anti-apartheid movement took hold on college campuses in the US, students had some success pressuring university administrations to divest from companies doing business in South Africa. This generation’s student movement has similarly demanded its schools divest from Israel – but faces a very different political climate and an aggressive crackdown from Washington.

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Peter Beinart, author of Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza, said: “Israel’s capacity to maintain its authoritarian system of control of the Palestinians, instead of cutting against the grain of politics in other countries, in some ways is actually at the vanguard of the rise of ethno-nationalist authoritarians around the world.

“South Africa was not a model for anybody in the late 1980s. But Israel is a model, whether it’s for Modi [in India] or Orbán [in Hungary] or the AfD [in Germany] or the Republican party in the United States to some degree. For all of those reasons it’s a much more uphill struggle, even though we are seeing shifts in public opinion.”

Beinart, a professor at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York, added: “There’s no question that there’s been a cultural shift. You can see it dramatically in public opinion. You can see it in popular culture. What’s not clear is how that shift in public opinion and popular culture is going to translate into elections and public policy. That’s the real question.”

theguardian

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