The Arab Boycott
The Economic War Against the Jews.
by Walter Henry Nelson and Terence Prittie.
Random House. 269 pp. $10.00.
One of the most striking manifestations of Arab hostility to Israel is the economic boycott administered by the Arab League, which seeks to isolate the Jewish state from normal commercial intercourse with the rest of the world. It is not uncommon for states to restrict their trade with others they consider hostile—the U.S. has done this for many years, in varying degrees of severity, with members of the Communist bloc. But the Arab boycott is much wider than other boycotts and embargoes; its extent would be unusual even between countries in a state of shooting war with each other. Not only do the Arab nations refuse to do any business with Israel itself, but they refuse to maintain commercial relations with any company anywhere which also does business with Israel (a secondary boycott), and they even go so far as to forbid companies wishing Arab trade to do business with any other companies that in turn trade with Israel (a tertiary boycott).
This theoretical structure of institutionalized hostility is, of course, impossible to enforce fully in a world characterized by a multitude of international commercial linkages continually increasing in both number and complexity. Indeed, without a substantial degree of voluntary cooperation on the part of world business in general, the boycott would prove largely unworkable, at least without inflicting an unacceptable amount of economic damage on the Arab states themselves. The fact is, however, that voluntary cooperation is widespread, and although the boycott is not as successful as it theoretically could be, it is infinitely more successful than it should be.
In The Economic War Against the Jews, Walter Henry Nelson and Terence Prittie explore the theory and practice of the Arab boycott, and trace its history and effects on companies and nations seeking Arab trade. Unfortunately, while the book attempts to deal with all of the major topics relevant to the boycott, the treatment is somewhat lacking in depth, and much of the book reads like an undigested mass of newspaper clippings and extracts from the copious files on the boycott kept by the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League. Little attempt has been made to approach this mass of material systematically, or to classify the ways the Arab Boycott Office deals with companies whose compliance with boycott requests deviates from the expected norm. Fortunately, the illustrative examples are sufficient in number for the reader to draw his own conclusions on fundamental matters.
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The economic boycott as an Arab weapon against Jewish settlement predates the establishment of the state of Israel. As long ago as the 1920’s there were organized attempts to prevent Arab residents of Palestine from patronizing Jewish businesses. Nelson and Prittie quote one slogan of 1929 (from the First Palestinian Women’s Congress, no less): “To buy nothing from the Jews but land, and to sell them everything but land.” The formal boycott of Israel came about as a continuation of this policy of unremitting hostility and refusal to admit the legitimacy of a Jewish state, even after the failure of the Arabs’ attempt to destroy Israel at birth.
In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the boycott was often met with scorn in the West, especially when the Arabs blacklisted popular entertainers (Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor) or movies (Walt Disney’s Snow White, because a cartoon horse bore the name “Samson”) that were regarded as unduly favorable to Israel. Periodically, a minor scandal would erupt when public attention was drawn to the efforts of companies to extricate themselves from inconvenient Israeli connections, as in the Norwich Union case of 1963, when one of England’s leading insurance companies requested the resignation from its board of directors of Lord Mancroft, a prominent Jewish businessman whose major offense apparently was that he served on another board together with the well-known British Zionist leader, Sir Isaac Wolfson. Yet even in those years, the boycott was far from ineffective. Major corporations (such as the Ford Motor Company) that refused to close down their Israeli operations were forbidden from setting up new operations in the Arab world or saw their existing operations expelled.
Still, it was only in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, when Arab economic power began to assume a commanding position on the world scene and the major Western economies began to falter (the two phenomena were of course connected), that the importance of attracting Arab customers began to loom much larger in the eyes of business, both in the U.S. and abroad. In the years since then, fear of displeasing Arab customers has led to greater compliance with boycott-inspired practices, sometimes even in advance of actual Arab requests. One convenient way of demonstrating freedom from any taint of Zionist sympathies, for example, has been to remove Jewish employees from visible positions in the hierarchy. Thus, a number of American architectural firms, seeing in the booming Arab countries an apparent avenue of salvation from the depressed domestic construction market, have severely restricted the hiring and assignment of Jews.
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Not only have companies in the U.S. and Europe voluntarily adopted practices even beyond those demanded by the Boycott Office, they have vociferously objected to proposed legislation which, by outlawing participation in secondary and tertiary boycott practices, would provide them with a convenient alibi for noncompliance. In this eagerness to please their Arab customers they have been abetted by the executive branches of the various governments involved, which have consistently sought to water down anti-boycott regulations on the grounds that governments should not interfere in free customer-client relationships (even though this principle would not seem to apply when one of the parties involved is the government of a foreign country); or on the grounds that other countries, not so principled, might capture the Arab trade; or on the grounds that a strong anti-boycott stand would disturb Arab governments to the point where they would retaliate by jeopardizing Arab-Israeli peace negotiations.
That the actual degree of compliance with the boycott has been above and beyond the call of duty is demonstrated by the fact that the Arabs themselves simply ignore the boycott when they are really interested in doing business. Thus, Saudi Arabia happily seeks to buy missiles from the same Raytheon Corporation which supplies similar weapons to Israel. The Hilton hotel chain, an unabashed foe of the boycott, is able to operate hotels in Cairo, Kuwait, Abu Dhabi, Bahrein, Khartoum—and in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.
In other cases, companies unwilling to defy the boycott openly can still find means to do business with Israel indirectly, and need not concern themselves unduly that the Boycott Office will devote even the minimal effort necessary to establish the real state of affairs. The truth is that the administration of the boycott is extremely haphazard: there is no definitive list of exactly how many and which companies are blacklisted, and those partial lists which are released periodically tend to be curiously constructed and full of ludicrous errors and misprints obvious to the casual but literate reader. It is possible that this is deliberate, reflecting a calculated recognition that uncertainty breeds fear, but it may also be simply a matter of incompetence.
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Nelson and Prittie are impressed by the progress which has been made in France, the U.S., and Britain, where some anti-boycott legislation has been introduced. They conclude their book with the proposal that an international legislative consensus be reached that would enable companies to reject boycott pressures without fear of losing business to others observing the boycott.
This, however, is hardly a likely prospect. Unlike a case such as that of Rhodesia, where international lip service is paid to a virtually universal embargo at the same time that widespread clandestine trade goes on, those who publicly deplore the boycott of Israel are seldom moved to more than token efforts to oppose its practice. In fact, even those best disposed toward Israel often are unwilling to take its part aggressively: not one country in the world would condemn even the blatant aggression of the Arabs in the Yom Kippur War.
Nelson and Prittie devote considerable space to a discussion of anti-Jewish attitudes in Islam, and this helps illuminate the historic wellsprings of the primary boycott against Israel. To understand fully the success of the secondary and tertiary boycotts, however, one would have to explore as well the history of Christian-Jewish relations, with special attention to that peculiarly Christian form of resentment toward Jewish self-assertion which the Arabs have been able tacitly to count on in their economic war against the Jews.
