BDS is doomed to fail for one simple reason: The world needs Israel more than it hates Israel
Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Iraq do not recognize Israel.
But politics ends where survival begins.
Modern drip irrigation - one of the most important agricultural technologies for arid and water-stressed countries - was developed in Israel. It saves water, increases yields, and helps grow food where traditional agriculture collapses under heat, drought, and scarcity.
The technology works even when the politics donāt.
You can refuse to say āIsraelā.
You can ban Israeli passports.
You can preach boycott from a podium.
But when your farmers need to feed people with less water, Israeli innovation becomes very hard to boycott.
That is the core problem with BDS: it is a luxury ideology.
It works best for people who already have full shelves, reliable hospitals, smartphones, GPS, water systems, cybersecurity, and modern medicine. It is easy to shout āboycott Israelā while using a phone, app, chip, medical device, irrigation system, or security technology shaped by Israeli innovation.
BDS is not a serious economic strategy - It is a performance.
And the performance collapses the moment reality arrives.
Look at Judea and Samaria.
If Norway, Ireland - or anyone else - wants to boycott Jewish businesses there, they should be honest about what that means.
It does not āfree Palestine.ā
It does not feed a single Palestinian child.
It targets Israeli-owned businesses where Palestinians often work, earn salaries, support families, and interact daily with Jews in ways Western activists claim to support but constantly sabotage.
These jobs often pay far more than jobs under the Palestinian Authority. They create economic cooperation. They create daily contact. They are one of the few places where Jews and Palestinians actually work side by side instead of being reduced to slogans by people thousands of miles away.
So what do the boycotters do?
They target those businesses.
They do not liberate Palestinians.
They get Palestinians fired.
The SodaStream case was the perfect example. BDS activists celebrated pressure on an Israeli factory in Judea and Samaria - a factory that employed hundreds of Palestinians. When the factory moved, many Palestinian workers lost good jobs.
The activists called it a victory.
Not for the Palestinian father who lost his paycheck.
Only for the activistsā ego.
That is the sickness of BDS: it would rather Palestinians be unemployed than employed by Jews.
And the damage does not stop there.
Countries, cities, universities, and pension funds that adopt BDS are not just making a moral error. They may be making a financial one.
In the United States, many anti-BDS laws penalize companies or institutions that boycott Israel. And in New York, an ADL/JLens analysis warned that if city pension funds adopted BDS-style divestment from major companies doing business with Israel, taxpayers and retirees could face more than $37 billion in losses.
So the boycotters want to hurt Israel.
Instead, they risk hurting Palestinians, workers, retirees, taxpayers, universities, cities, and their own economies.
And then there is the absurd theater of the Coca-Cola boycotts.
Out of all the Israeli-linked technology embedded in modern life - water systems, stents, medical devices, cherry tomatoes, agricultural science, Intel chips, USB drives, Waze, cybersecurity, desalination, emergency medicine - they obsess over soda.
Because nobody wants to give up their phone, their navigation app, their laptop, their medical care, or the irrigation systems feeding entire populations.
So instead, they boycott Coca-Cola.
And then, conveniently, a new āresistance colaā appears to sell them a substitute.
The useful idiots get to feel revolutionary.
Someone else gets to make money.
But Israel keeps building.
That is why BDS will fail.
Because Israel is too useful, too innovative, too integrated, and too necessary to the systems that keep modern life running.
You can boycott an Israeli orange.
Good luck boycotting Israeli water technology.
You can scream about āapartheidā BS while using Waze to get to the protest.
You can denounce Zionism on a device powered by technology shaped in Israeli labs.
You can refuse to recognize Israel at the United Nations and still depend on the inventions of the people you pretend do not exist.
But maybe BDS and the last 2 years accidentally taught Israel the most important lesson of all:
These countries cannot live without Israel.
And slowly, Israel is starting to understand that leverage should be used to stabilize the region, and fight incitement.
Jordan has spent decades benefiting from water cooperation with Israel. Under the 1994 peace framework and later arrangements, Israel supplied Jordan with critical water in one of the driest countries on earth. Israel cooperated because Israel has always preferred regional stability over regional collapse.
But cooperation cannot be a one-way street forever.
If a country depends on Israeli water while allowing antisemitic incitement, anti-Israel hysteria, and educational poison to flourish, Israel has every right to ask:
Why should the Jewish state subsidize hatred against Jews?
Maybe this should be the new model.
If you want Israeli water, stop teaching your children to hate Israel.
If you want Israeli technology, stop funding campaigns to destroy Israel.
If you want Israeli medical innovation, stop pretending the Jewish state has no right to exist.
If you want Israeli intelligence, trade, desalination, agriculture, cybersecurity, and emergency cooperation - act like a partner, not a parasite.
And maybe Europe should hear the same message.
European governments benefits from Israeli intelligence, cybersecurity, medical research, water technology, military innovation, trade, and restraint - while funding NGOs, UN bodies, and political campaigns that demonize the very country helping defend the West from threats Europe refuses to name.
It's easy to boycott Israel when someone else assumes Israeli intelligence will always be there to stop the next jihadist attack.Ā
One day, Europe may discover how expensive virtue signaling can be.
