Israel Just Triggered a Boycott It Can’t Contain

As the war on Gaza drags on, BDS pressure is turning ordinary commercial links with Israel into reputational liabilities businesses no longer want. Right, so Boker Tov is an Israeli-owned food chain that’s been operating in Belgium, selling Israeli street food under a softened “Levantine” label, working on the quiet assumption that food sits above politics if you soften the language enough. Well it didn’t work. The chain has gone bankrupt, four restaurants have shut, and the owners have said the customers stopped coming once Gaza couldn’t be ignored. BDS strikes again. No ban from trading. No court ruling. No dramatic showdown. Just tables staying empty and the business no longer adding up. For a long time there’s been a lot of confidence that whatever Israel does, the consequences stay safely boxed in, something we commentators argue about while everyday commerce carries on unaffected. BDS has always sought to change that and businesses don’t survive the moment enough people decide they don’t want the association anymore. Consumer choice – you can’t fight it. But this is a bigger story than just one restaurant chain in Belgium. It’s about increasing numbers of people making similar choices outside Israel, not necessarily even as part of global BDS movements either, but also without that coordination and without permission, and so the story stops being about protest per se and starts being about Israeli reputation itself and no amount of Hasbara that can fix this when mindsets are simply shifting against you. Right, so Boker Tov has shut its doors in Belgium, filed for bankruptcy, and exited the market, and the owners have said plainly that organised boycott campaigns after Gaza cut the customer base out from under them. Four restaurants, gone, in a country Israel doesn’t govern, by decisions Israel didn’t authorise, through pressure Israel can’t regulate, which leaves consequences operating outside any diplomatic channel that used to cushion this kind of fallout.