Vision to Reality: The Reut Blog

The story of a university choir seeking to perform in both Israel and the PA reflects a tactic used by those seeking to boycott Israel, namely, creating an all or nothing dynamic.

The BBC has an interesting story on a choir of Clare College, Cambridge that has been banned from visiting the West Bank after appearing in Israel. While it’s unclear from the article, it seems like the initiators of this ‘boycott’ were the London-based Palestine Solidarity Campaign who wrote a letter asking that the choir cancel its tour of Israel or risk, in their words, “appearing indifferent to Palestinian suffering”. Following this, it seems that the Palestinian Authority formally asked the Choir not to come.

The General Secretary of the PSC said that travelling to the West Bank did not excuse the choir’s tour of Israel which was “surprising and shocking” as it “promotes Israel as a normal state rather than one which represses Palestinians”.

This story ties into one of the tactics of those who seek to fundamentally delegitimize Israel, namely creating an ‘all or nothing dynamic,’ in which those who support some aspect of Palestinian independence or ‘peace’ are pushed into supporting the boycott of Israel as the only viable option for reflecting their views. In other words, rather than promoting joint Israeli-Palestinian projects, there is a denial of any middle path between the two parties (which would imply that Israel (also) has ‘rights’ as an entity)

In order to counter this, Israel will need to break this all or nothing dynamic by portraying the conflict as a non-zero sum game (some interesting examples of this were presented by Khaled Abu Toameh in his article ‘What does “Pro-Palestinian” really mean’ )

As a side point, this story also touches on the apparent influence of hubs on the internal policy of the PA itself.