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rfmcdonaldYesterday, I was browsing the Internet when I came across this article in the Washington Post:
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 30, 2002; Page A01
JERUSALEM, July 29 -- Backing out of a concert performance with the legendary conductor Zubin Mehta is like skipping a golf date with Tiger Woods or a dinner with Julia Child. But the unthinkable is becoming epidemic here as the world's great musicians take a pass on Israel because they fear for their security or disagree with the government's policies.
"Fifty percent or more of the foreign artists have canceled," said Mehta, music director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. In the current production of Richard Strauss's opera "Salome," he said, "we've had eight cancellations in the cast."
The orchestra announced today that it was forced to cancel an eight-concert tour in the United States next month because no insurance company would cover the performances due to concerns about possible terrorist attacks, said a spokeswoman for the orchestra, Dalia Meroz.
"They think our orchestra is a target for terrorism," Meroz said.
Israel also used to be a regular stop on the pop music circuit, hosting the likes of Madonna, Eric Clapton, R.E.M. and Santana. But it has been more than a year since a mega-star played here. In some cases, Israeli artists have been disinvited from playing abroad. And the Tel Aviv film festival was canceled this year because the organizers feared no stars would come.
The problem goes beyond the arts. In March, the European football federation suspended soccer matches in Israel, citing security concerns. Israeli home games are scheduled to be played in Cyprus.
Influential academics, angry at the Israeli government's actions against Palestinians, are pushing a boycott of Israel that hundreds of university professors have joined. And on the economic front, some Norwegian supermarkets label Israeli products with stickers so customers can decide whether to buy them.
"Israel is not the flavor of the month, that's for sure," Mehta said. "The world is turning against it."
While there is little evidence of an internationally coordinated anti-Israel boycott of the sort aimed at South Africa in the 1980s, a sense of isolation is taking hold here, along with a concern that Israel is being shunned, dealing a blow to its national psyche and its decades-long drive for acceptance.
"Israel has always wanted to be integrated. It's an obsession," said Calev Ben-David, managing editor of the Jerusalem Post, who complained that "even the traditional supporters of Israel are not coming" these days.
"Never since the worst days of the Lebanon war has Israel felt so alone and isolated," he said, referring to the Israeli invasion of its northern neighbor in 1982. "We're not looking just for integration anymore. We're looking for any sign of solidarity and acceptance we can get. We really need a boost. We'd give the Palestinians a state if Bruce Springsteen would come."
Many artists have canceled appearances because of concerns about Palestinian suicide bombers who have attacked buses, hotels, restaurants and nightclubs. There is also a growing fear here and abroad of a large terrorist attack like those in New York and at the Pentagon on Sept. 11.
But many Israelis say that while security concerns are almost always the sole reason given for the cancellations, they believe many people are not coming because they oppose Israel's actions in the conflict with Palestinians but do not want to say so publicly.
"During the wars, there were always cancellations for reasons of personal security, but this time it's a very different story," said a Hebrew University philosopher and political scientist, Yaron Ezrahi.
"There is a moral issue about coming to [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon's Israel when it is engaged in actions which appear to be excessive," he said. "This excommunication only reinforces the idea that the whole world is against us because we're Jews."
Such was the case last month at the Israel Festival, one of the country's biggest cultural events. Three groups -- a dance troupe from Belgium and orchestras from Germany and Italy -- canceled at the last moment.
The groups from Germany and Italy cited security concerns. But the Belgian group -- a 34-member troupe called Rwanda '94 that stages performances about the massacre of more than a half million ethnic Tutsis -- said its reasons were overridingly political.
"There was genocide of the Jews, then there was genocide in Rwanda, and now Israel is trying to get rid of the Palestinians," said the group's music director, Gareth List, explaining that most of the people in his troupe "oppose the way Palestinians have been treated for the last 54 years."
Similar concerns prompted more than 200 painters, photographers, poets and other artists to endorse an Internet petition calling on their peers to "cancel all exhibitions and other cultural events that are scheduled to occur in Israel" because "the art world must speak out against the current Israeli war crimes and atrocities."
Many people, however, are genuinely concerned about their safety, event organizers said. Others cite personal or professional conflicts or medical excuses, which organizers said they sometimes read as a tip-off that the real problem is political.
"Nobody says it openly," Mehta said. "At the moment they say, 'Look, my family just won't let me go.' That's usually what they do."
But the security concerns are real, he said, and apparently have played a role in the decision of many stars not to come.
"I say, 'I'm going, and I cannot force you,' " said Mehta, 66, the former director of the Los Angeles and New York philharmonics, who spends about nine weeks a year in Israel. "I cannot guarantee them 100 percent safety. My mother sits in Los Angeles and is shaking every day. If I don't call twice a day, she's nervous."
"My parents, my uncle in Kalamazoo, my good friends all along kept saying they wished I would cancel," said Susan Anthony, an up-and-coming American soprano who took over the title role in "Salome" when opera great Jane Eaglen canceled for security reasons. "There was a bombing less than a mile from my hotel three days ago, and the cast was on the phone with each other -- turn on CNN! -- and then the families try to get through to make sure you're not down there."
Lia van Leer, founder and director of the Jerusalem Film Festival, said her event typically draws as many as 200 foreign actors, directors and other film industry people, but this year attracted only about 60, and no one of the stature of such past attendees as Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda and Kirk Douglas.
"It's awkward. They have another agenda, they're starting another film, they have a vacation scheduled -- and I can't blame them," she said. But for the most part, "it's not a boycott for political reasons, it's only a boycott because people are afraid to come here."
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which hosts chamber music performances, had so many cancellations by foreigners this year that it recently decided to book only local artists for its next concert season. And the Tel Aviv film festival, which was canceled this year for the same reason, has been postponed indefinitely, said Edna Fainaru, the festival's founder.
The pop music scene has been particularly hard-hit, said the Jerusalem Post's Ben-David, who has covered the arts scene in Israel for more than 10 years.
"Rock stars who live totally on the edge are afraid to come here," he said. At the same time, "the rock community tends to veer toward a left, politically correct line, and to some degree it has become politically impossible in that community" to perform in Israel.
"Before, any big band coming from the U.S. to Europe would drop by Israel. That's over," said Shuki Weiss, a top concert producer who has brought David
Bowie, Bob Dylan and other top acts to Israel.
"The general idea for the last 20 years was to put Israel on the map, and with all modesty, we succeeded very well," he said. "But now, when you see all the familiar big names going to Europe or on world tour and you are not considered, it's a strange feeling of isolation. It's set us back six years."
Not only are international artists shunning Israel. In a few cases, Israeli artists have been disinvited from performing abroad, including in Europe and the United States -- once again, usually because of security.
Chava Alberstein, an Israeli folk singer, and singer-songwriter David Daor were asked not to perform at European concerts this year, their agents said.
"Those who canceled did not make anti-Semitic remarks. It was mainly a security thing," said Pazit Daor, David Daor's wife and manager. "In Detroit, they were scared they would need to protect the whole place."
The tool of the cultural boycott, as Anderson notes, was last deployed on a uniform global scale in relation to South Africa. In fact, it was first deployed against South Africa. The cultural boycott is a tool that is most successful directed against regimes which are relatively open to the wider world and have relatively pluralistic societies. Even after the inauguration of grand apartheid, white South Africans thought of themselves as essentially Western: as members of the Free World, as citizens of one of the founding states of the British Commonwealth of Nations, as Christians, as democrats. Granted that the growing severity of South Africa's racial policies placed that country in direct contrast with the rest of the West, the bulk of hite South Africans didn't that placed them beyond the pale.
The cultural boycott placed South Africans in a different position. Afrikaner nationalists had long seen their people as a people set apart from their African neighbours and Western colonizers, but there was long an outside presence on Afrikaners--American country music, for instance, seems to have been a major influence on Afrikaner popular music, while the volkism of much Afrikaner nationalism had been lifted from the Germany of the 1930s. Anglo-South Africans had far more links with the outside world owing to the community's relatively recent implantation and its integration into British-founded cultural and migratory networks. The cultural boycotts that began in the 1960s and gradually intensified in the following generation gradually cut off the intercourse with the outside world that white South Africans had come to expect: no more tours by musicians, no more visits by sports teams, no more stated interest or desire to do much of anything with a South Africa that was placed beyond the pale of Western popular culture. This had some sort of impact, although arguably less so than the economic sanctions which began to cut into the standards of living of all South Africans by the 1980s.
Cultural sanctions, judging by the South African experience, are most effective against relatively liberal societies which place a high premium on their cultural intercourse with the rest of the world; more authoritarian regimes which use cultural events to promote their prestige (think of sports and "high culture" in the Soviet bloc during the Cold War) might also be vulnerable. Cultural sanctions are most effective, in other words, against societies which aren't rapidly xenophobic but which care about the outside world; neither Burma nor North Korea would care overmuch if their sports teams couldn't compete in international events.
As I wrote earlier, Israel as a country has a chequered past, like all countries of European settlement. I continue to place Israel among those countries of settlement that had relatively dense native populations not overwhelmed by relatively modest flows of immigrants--South Africa, pre-1962 Algeria, and New Caledonia/Kanaky all qualify. Where Israel differs, of course, is that the push factors placed on Britons or French to emigrate these countries were far, far weaker than the push factors applied to Jews from the 1930s on, hence Israel's retention of a Jewish majority within its sovereign frontiers from independence to the present day.
I have some serious concerns about Israeli polciies. I recognize, for instance, that the wave of suicide/murder bombings that have hit Israel since September 2000 (at least) entirely justify military responses, and that the nihilistic anti-Semitism that seems to have the upper hand in Palestinian public opinion hardly makes peace likely. I also believe, however, that Israeli policies since 1967 bear a fairly large share of the responsibility for current public opinion in the West Bank (never mind the Gaza Strip); policies which supported the creation of exclusively Jewish (not Israeli) colonies in the Palestinian territories, breaking up the population of the regions into small enclaves and cutting them off from their natural resource hinterlands, transforming the large and growing population into a proletariat dependent on Israeli good will for prosperity, aren't stable in the long run. Hate to be blunt, but look at South Africa. Never mind that the Israeli policy of deporting secular Palestinian nationalists from the occupied territories did a wonderful job of creating an opportunity for nihilistic fundamentalist groups like Hamas to gain support.
Israel is threatened, though I don't think it's mortally threatened--suicide bombers are not going to destroy the Israeli state, unless they somehow get weapons of mass destruction. I think it may well be impossible for Israel, unprompted by the outside world, to establish even a heavily-armed cold peace; so long as Israelis feel threatened, they will support almost any set of reasonable policies that seem at least theoretically capable of eliminating their perceived existential threat. Outside pressure on Israel--in particular, the United States under Dubya living up to its hoped-for "good cop" reputation in the Quartet, refraining from unconditional support of Sharon--is almost certainly necessary.
The question to be asked on relation to Israel and cultural boycotts is whether or not cultural boycotts are appropriate in Israel's case. Do Israeli actions to date--briefly put, the counterproductive parcellization of the Palestinian population into economically unviable enclaves while Jewish settlers confiscate new lands almost at well--merit the application of cultural sanctions? So far, I don't think they have.
Unlike South Africa in the 1980s, or Serbia in the 1990s, Israel remains a liberal-demcoratic society within its own borders. Granted that Israel has a massive security and military establishment, this establishment's attention is directed outwards. Granted that Israel is facing major challenges in extending equal treatment in fact (as well as in letter) to its Arab minority, and that there are some indications that Israel might have acquired a non-Jewish Russian minority thanks to the recent flood of immigrants, it is committed (despite the worrying rhetoric about the kind of Jewish state Israel needs to be from some right-wingers) to civil and political rights for its citizenry. Granted that conservative theocrats committed to an exclusivistic definition of who is or is not Jewish are in control of the religious establishment, their views don't monopolize Israeli Judaism.
Perhaps most importantly, unlike South Africa or Serbia, Israeli politics--it seems from my readings--aren't dominated by malice. Israeli actions, unlike South African or Serbian actions, don't seem to be dominated by hate; rather, they seem to be dominated by a mixture of confused motives, ranging from a minority's irredentist desires to a majority's natural desire for security. That's what makes the Israeli/Palestinian situation a true tragedy in the Greek sense.
Mind, this can change. Myself, I refuse to knowingly buy any product manufactured in one of the Israeli settlements; granted that many of these settlements (Ariel in the West Bank comes to mind) will probably be transferred to Israeli sovereignty if/when peace comes, for the time being they are illegal colonies. If Sharon redoubled settlement-building activities, or supported military actions which inflicted heavy civilian casualties, I could well come to support cultural and other sanctions against Israel. Much would have to change first, though.
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, July 30, 2002; Page A01
JERUSALEM, July 29 -- Backing out of a concert performance with the legendary conductor Zubin Mehta is like skipping a golf date with Tiger Woods or a dinner with Julia Child. But the unthinkable is becoming epidemic here as the world's great musicians take a pass on Israel because they fear for their security or disagree with the government's policies.
"Fifty percent or more of the foreign artists have canceled," said Mehta, music director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. In the current production of Richard Strauss's opera "Salome," he said, "we've had eight cancellations in the cast."
The orchestra announced today that it was forced to cancel an eight-concert tour in the United States next month because no insurance company would cover the performances due to concerns about possible terrorist attacks, said a spokeswoman for the orchestra, Dalia Meroz.
"They think our orchestra is a target for terrorism," Meroz said.
Israel also used to be a regular stop on the pop music circuit, hosting the likes of Madonna, Eric Clapton, R.E.M. and Santana. But it has been more than a year since a mega-star played here. In some cases, Israeli artists have been disinvited from playing abroad. And the Tel Aviv film festival was canceled this year because the organizers feared no stars would come.
The problem goes beyond the arts. In March, the European football federation suspended soccer matches in Israel, citing security concerns. Israeli home games are scheduled to be played in Cyprus.
Influential academics, angry at the Israeli government's actions against Palestinians, are pushing a boycott of Israel that hundreds of university professors have joined. And on the economic front, some Norwegian supermarkets label Israeli products with stickers so customers can decide whether to buy them.
"Israel is not the flavor of the month, that's for sure," Mehta said. "The world is turning against it."
While there is little evidence of an internationally coordinated anti-Israel boycott of the sort aimed at South Africa in the 1980s, a sense of isolation is taking hold here, along with a concern that Israel is being shunned, dealing a blow to its national psyche and its decades-long drive for acceptance.
"Israel has always wanted to be integrated. It's an obsession," said Calev Ben-David, managing editor of the Jerusalem Post, who complained that "even the traditional supporters of Israel are not coming" these days.
"Never since the worst days of the Lebanon war has Israel felt so alone and isolated," he said, referring to the Israeli invasion of its northern neighbor in 1982. "We're not looking just for integration anymore. We're looking for any sign of solidarity and acceptance we can get. We really need a boost. We'd give the Palestinians a state if Bruce Springsteen would come."
Many artists have canceled appearances because of concerns about Palestinian suicide bombers who have attacked buses, hotels, restaurants and nightclubs. There is also a growing fear here and abroad of a large terrorist attack like those in New York and at the Pentagon on Sept. 11.
But many Israelis say that while security concerns are almost always the sole reason given for the cancellations, they believe many people are not coming because they oppose Israel's actions in the conflict with Palestinians but do not want to say so publicly.
"During the wars, there were always cancellations for reasons of personal security, but this time it's a very different story," said a Hebrew University philosopher and political scientist, Yaron Ezrahi.
"There is a moral issue about coming to [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon's Israel when it is engaged in actions which appear to be excessive," he said. "This excommunication only reinforces the idea that the whole world is against us because we're Jews."
Such was the case last month at the Israel Festival, one of the country's biggest cultural events. Three groups -- a dance troupe from Belgium and orchestras from Germany and Italy -- canceled at the last moment.
The groups from Germany and Italy cited security concerns. But the Belgian group -- a 34-member troupe called Rwanda '94 that stages performances about the massacre of more than a half million ethnic Tutsis -- said its reasons were overridingly political.
"There was genocide of the Jews, then there was genocide in Rwanda, and now Israel is trying to get rid of the Palestinians," said the group's music director, Gareth List, explaining that most of the people in his troupe "oppose the way Palestinians have been treated for the last 54 years."
Similar concerns prompted more than 200 painters, photographers, poets and other artists to endorse an Internet petition calling on their peers to "cancel all exhibitions and other cultural events that are scheduled to occur in Israel" because "the art world must speak out against the current Israeli war crimes and atrocities."
Many people, however, are genuinely concerned about their safety, event organizers said. Others cite personal or professional conflicts or medical excuses, which organizers said they sometimes read as a tip-off that the real problem is political.
"Nobody says it openly," Mehta said. "At the moment they say, 'Look, my family just won't let me go.' That's usually what they do."
But the security concerns are real, he said, and apparently have played a role in the decision of many stars not to come.
"I say, 'I'm going, and I cannot force you,' " said Mehta, 66, the former director of the Los Angeles and New York philharmonics, who spends about nine weeks a year in Israel. "I cannot guarantee them 100 percent safety. My mother sits in Los Angeles and is shaking every day. If I don't call twice a day, she's nervous."
"My parents, my uncle in Kalamazoo, my good friends all along kept saying they wished I would cancel," said Susan Anthony, an up-and-coming American soprano who took over the title role in "Salome" when opera great Jane Eaglen canceled for security reasons. "There was a bombing less than a mile from my hotel three days ago, and the cast was on the phone with each other -- turn on CNN! -- and then the families try to get through to make sure you're not down there."
Lia van Leer, founder and director of the Jerusalem Film Festival, said her event typically draws as many as 200 foreign actors, directors and other film industry people, but this year attracted only about 60, and no one of the stature of such past attendees as Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda and Kirk Douglas.
"It's awkward. They have another agenda, they're starting another film, they have a vacation scheduled -- and I can't blame them," she said. But for the most part, "it's not a boycott for political reasons, it's only a boycott because people are afraid to come here."
The Tel Aviv Museum of Art, which hosts chamber music performances, had so many cancellations by foreigners this year that it recently decided to book only local artists for its next concert season. And the Tel Aviv film festival, which was canceled this year for the same reason, has been postponed indefinitely, said Edna Fainaru, the festival's founder.
The pop music scene has been particularly hard-hit, said the Jerusalem Post's Ben-David, who has covered the arts scene in Israel for more than 10 years.
"Rock stars who live totally on the edge are afraid to come here," he said. At the same time, "the rock community tends to veer toward a left, politically correct line, and to some degree it has become politically impossible in that community" to perform in Israel.
"Before, any big band coming from the U.S. to Europe would drop by Israel. That's over," said Shuki Weiss, a top concert producer who has brought David
Bowie, Bob Dylan and other top acts to Israel.
"The general idea for the last 20 years was to put Israel on the map, and with all modesty, we succeeded very well," he said. "But now, when you see all the familiar big names going to Europe or on world tour and you are not considered, it's a strange feeling of isolation. It's set us back six years."
Not only are international artists shunning Israel. In a few cases, Israeli artists have been disinvited from performing abroad, including in Europe and the United States -- once again, usually because of security.
Chava Alberstein, an Israeli folk singer, and singer-songwriter David Daor were asked not to perform at European concerts this year, their agents said.
"Those who canceled did not make anti-Semitic remarks. It was mainly a security thing," said Pazit Daor, David Daor's wife and manager. "In Detroit, they were scared they would need to protect the whole place."
The tool of the cultural boycott, as Anderson notes, was last deployed on a uniform global scale in relation to South Africa. In fact, it was first deployed against South Africa. The cultural boycott is a tool that is most successful directed against regimes which are relatively open to the wider world and have relatively pluralistic societies. Even after the inauguration of grand apartheid, white South Africans thought of themselves as essentially Western: as members of the Free World, as citizens of one of the founding states of the British Commonwealth of Nations, as Christians, as democrats. Granted that the growing severity of South Africa's racial policies placed that country in direct contrast with the rest of the West, the bulk of hite South Africans didn't that placed them beyond the pale.
The cultural boycott placed South Africans in a different position. Afrikaner nationalists had long seen their people as a people set apart from their African neighbours and Western colonizers, but there was long an outside presence on Afrikaners--American country music, for instance, seems to have been a major influence on Afrikaner popular music, while the volkism of much Afrikaner nationalism had been lifted from the Germany of the 1930s. Anglo-South Africans had far more links with the outside world owing to the community's relatively recent implantation and its integration into British-founded cultural and migratory networks. The cultural boycotts that began in the 1960s and gradually intensified in the following generation gradually cut off the intercourse with the outside world that white South Africans had come to expect: no more tours by musicians, no more visits by sports teams, no more stated interest or desire to do much of anything with a South Africa that was placed beyond the pale of Western popular culture. This had some sort of impact, although arguably less so than the economic sanctions which began to cut into the standards of living of all South Africans by the 1980s.
Cultural sanctions, judging by the South African experience, are most effective against relatively liberal societies which place a high premium on their cultural intercourse with the rest of the world; more authoritarian regimes which use cultural events to promote their prestige (think of sports and "high culture" in the Soviet bloc during the Cold War) might also be vulnerable. Cultural sanctions are most effective, in other words, against societies which aren't rapidly xenophobic but which care about the outside world; neither Burma nor North Korea would care overmuch if their sports teams couldn't compete in international events.
As I wrote earlier, Israel as a country has a chequered past, like all countries of European settlement. I continue to place Israel among those countries of settlement that had relatively dense native populations not overwhelmed by relatively modest flows of immigrants--South Africa, pre-1962 Algeria, and New Caledonia/Kanaky all qualify. Where Israel differs, of course, is that the push factors placed on Britons or French to emigrate these countries were far, far weaker than the push factors applied to Jews from the 1930s on, hence Israel's retention of a Jewish majority within its sovereign frontiers from independence to the present day.
I have some serious concerns about Israeli polciies. I recognize, for instance, that the wave of suicide/murder bombings that have hit Israel since September 2000 (at least) entirely justify military responses, and that the nihilistic anti-Semitism that seems to have the upper hand in Palestinian public opinion hardly makes peace likely. I also believe, however, that Israeli policies since 1967 bear a fairly large share of the responsibility for current public opinion in the West Bank (never mind the Gaza Strip); policies which supported the creation of exclusively Jewish (not Israeli) colonies in the Palestinian territories, breaking up the population of the regions into small enclaves and cutting them off from their natural resource hinterlands, transforming the large and growing population into a proletariat dependent on Israeli good will for prosperity, aren't stable in the long run. Hate to be blunt, but look at South Africa. Never mind that the Israeli policy of deporting secular Palestinian nationalists from the occupied territories did a wonderful job of creating an opportunity for nihilistic fundamentalist groups like Hamas to gain support.
Israel is threatened, though I don't think it's mortally threatened--suicide bombers are not going to destroy the Israeli state, unless they somehow get weapons of mass destruction. I think it may well be impossible for Israel, unprompted by the outside world, to establish even a heavily-armed cold peace; so long as Israelis feel threatened, they will support almost any set of reasonable policies that seem at least theoretically capable of eliminating their perceived existential threat. Outside pressure on Israel--in particular, the United States under Dubya living up to its hoped-for "good cop" reputation in the Quartet, refraining from unconditional support of Sharon--is almost certainly necessary.
The question to be asked on relation to Israel and cultural boycotts is whether or not cultural boycotts are appropriate in Israel's case. Do Israeli actions to date--briefly put, the counterproductive parcellization of the Palestinian population into economically unviable enclaves while Jewish settlers confiscate new lands almost at well--merit the application of cultural sanctions? So far, I don't think they have.
Unlike South Africa in the 1980s, or Serbia in the 1990s, Israel remains a liberal-demcoratic society within its own borders. Granted that Israel has a massive security and military establishment, this establishment's attention is directed outwards. Granted that Israel is facing major challenges in extending equal treatment in fact (as well as in letter) to its Arab minority, and that there are some indications that Israel might have acquired a non-Jewish Russian minority thanks to the recent flood of immigrants, it is committed (despite the worrying rhetoric about the kind of Jewish state Israel needs to be from some right-wingers) to civil and political rights for its citizenry. Granted that conservative theocrats committed to an exclusivistic definition of who is or is not Jewish are in control of the religious establishment, their views don't monopolize Israeli Judaism.
Perhaps most importantly, unlike South Africa or Serbia, Israeli politics--it seems from my readings--aren't dominated by malice. Israeli actions, unlike South African or Serbian actions, don't seem to be dominated by hate; rather, they seem to be dominated by a mixture of confused motives, ranging from a minority's irredentist desires to a majority's natural desire for security. That's what makes the Israeli/Palestinian situation a true tragedy in the Greek sense.
Mind, this can change. Myself, I refuse to knowingly buy any product manufactured in one of the Israeli settlements; granted that many of these settlements (Ariel in the West Bank comes to mind) will probably be transferred to Israeli sovereignty if/when peace comes, for the time being they are illegal colonies. If Sharon redoubled settlement-building activities, or supported military actions which inflicted heavy civilian casualties, I could well come to support cultural and other sanctions against Israel. Much would have to change first, though.
