Study: BDS has zero impact on Israeli businesses

The anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement has complexly failed in its mission to financially harm the Jewish state and has no impact whatsoever on its economy.

Israel’s Globes financial news reported last week that a study of the impact of BDS on the Israeli economy estimates the damage at 0.004 percent, while some companies even benefit from the boycott.

Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs launched the study in 2010, and based on queries to hundreds of senior executives of large Israeli companies from every economic sector, the study has determined that the BDS has failed in its mission.

When asked to quantify in money how much their company lost as a result of the economic boycott created by the BDS, The proportion of Israeli companies able to state that they had been damaged by the sanctions was around 0.75 percent.

The rate of damage of each of them was less than 10 percent of their revenues, and even that was mostly during Israel’s counter-terrorism Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014. The companies experienced no damage in other years.

A calculation of all the numbers shows that the cumulative proportion of economic damage since 2010 was 0.004 percent. To put it in tangible figures, if the Israeli economy’s yearly income were to average NIS 1 million, the damage from the sanctions would have been NIS 40 ($12), a completely negligible sum.

BDS helping Israel businesses

Ironically, there are also Israeli companies that benefited from the BDS’ campaign against them.

One Israeli business reported that BDS activists demonstrating in front of its store in London left after two days when the media lost interest. After they left, the number of buyers at the store was four times the number on an ordinary day. Local non-Jewish residents who support Israel came especially to buy at the store in order to demonstrate their sympathy for Israel, so BDS essentially created a boomerang effect.

Similarly, BDS’ academic boycotts are failing as well, and while some artists have joined the BDS cultural boycott of the Jewish state, the vast majority of performers ignore it.