Another brick in the wall

“May God protect the Israelis and the Palestinians—and protect me from their friends,” Thomas Friedman once remarked in a usual moment of clarity. A quip that neatly encapsulates the damage done by those self-proclaimed justice warriors who parachuted into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict armed with a MacBook Air and a bowl of açai. They claim to speak for Palestinian suffering, to amplify Gazan anguish between iced lattes—when in truth, they mostly export resentment into the cafes and campuses of Europe and North America.

For years, the BDS campaign was considered a political sideshow, an annoying footnote mostly bothering Israeli Pink Floyd fans. But since 2023, it has matured into something more serious, evolving beyond cardboard signs and plastic megaphones. It’s now present in venture capital boardrooms, buried in procurement emails, whispered between product managers in California. Israeli entrepreneurs report deals collapsing without explanation. European firms walk away from contracts as casually as they turn up the heat in winter. In academia, boycotting Israeli scholars no longer requires a declaration—just silence.

Some cases are especially telling: the University of Amsterdam initiated a severance of ties with Israeli institutions. Oxford City Council passed a motion to boycott companies “complicit in war crimes.”

The temptation is strong to sneer and dismiss this as veiled antisemitism. But doing so earns you immediate membership in the prestigious club known as “part of the problem.” Because moral absolutism isn’t exclusive to pro-Palestinian activists. Whether it’s gender studies majors at Columbia or pro-Israel evangelicals in Appalachia, both camps share the same psychological drive: they seek personal redemption through their obsession with the Holy Land.

And that’s where the anti-Israel campaign fails. If the aim is to solve the conflict—or at least imagine a better future—then dialogue is essential. But when students demand to blacklist all Israeli lecturers, even those with unequivocally left-wing credentials; when employees pressure their companies to cut ties with start-ups solely because they’re registered in Tel Aviv (as occurred with several US-based VCs); when an Israeli actress is harassed for simply being Israeli; or when Starbucks loses billions not for siding with Israel, but for failing to denounce it publicly—then the wall rises higher.

Even a Palestinian-Israeli film that exposed violent settler abuse in the South Hebron Hills—and won an Oscar—was blacklisted. Its content didn’t matter. Just the fact that one of its creators was Israeli. Another brick in the wall. And then another.

There’s something deeply depressing about watching artists cancel performances, investors pull out of deals, and city councils void contracts—not because of deep political conviction, but because that’s what everyone else is doing. This isn’t ideological boycott. It’s social reflex. A zero-effort moral gesture, worn like a fashionable pin.

Of course, Israel behaves in similar ways. State institutions react to boycott movements like teenagers offended on Instagram. Every critique is betrayal. Every statement—a conspiracy. No distinction is made between a tweet and state policy. Rather than asking how it is perceived, Israel attacks the very question.

Whether it’s adversarial policy—like that of Ireland’s current government—or corporate risk aversion, like Google firing employees protesting its partnership with the IDF or Carrefour pulling out of Jordan after prolonged local boycotts—Israel reads all of it through a binary lens of enemies and allies. This only reinforces the national reflex to never ask why there’s a campaign against it in the first place. Populism answered with populism, flags and fruit emojis clashing across Twitter.

The bitter truth is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a rare case where everyone is wrong. A boycott movement that prefers moral purity over dialogue. A government that favors defensiveness over vision. And American churchgoers who worship—well—Jesus. In between, millions of Israelis and Palestinians just want to live. Not international solidarity. Just a reality where someone stops shooting.

Maybe Friedman had it slightly wrong. God doesn’t need to protect him from the friends of Israelis and Palestinians—He needs to protect us from them. These are the arsonists of absolutism, the true fuel of a conflict turned total. A reality where there’s no room for nuance, fracture, or doubt. Just blind justice, louder hatred, and flags large enough to block out thought itself.