Boycott Drive Put Israel on a Blacklist. Now Israel Has One of Its Own.

JERUSALEM — Israel on Sunday published a blacklist of 20 organizations, including a Jewish group in the United States, whose leaders it has barred from entering the country for supporting an economic, cultural and academic boycott of Israel.

The list was drawn up under a nearly year-old law enacted to combat the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, which Israelis overwhelmingly oppose, consider anti-Semitic and view as calling for the country’s destruction.

Supporters of the pressure strategy favor the boycott of Israel until it ends the occupation of the West Bank, provides full equality under the law to Palestinian citizens of Israel and grants a right of return to Palestinian refugees. But refugees number in the millions, and their return would probably spell the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

“We have shifted from defense to offense,” said Gilad Erdan, minister of strategic affairs, whose office drew up the list, according to an article in Ha’aretz. “The boycott organizations need to know that the state of Israel will act against them” and not allow them to “enter its territory to harm its citizens.”

The blacklist, which is to take effect on March 1, includes Jewish Voice for Peace, a U.S. group with 70 chapters that says it has 15,000 dues-paying members.

Also on the list are other U.S. groups like the Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee, the feminist group Code Pink and the United States Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Organizations in Chile, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Sweden and South Africa are also named.

“These people are trying to exploit the law and our hospitality to act against Israel and to defame the country,” Interior Minister Aryeh Deri, who is responsible for enforcing the ban, told Ha’aretz.

Spokesmen for the two ministries did not respond to requests for interviews.

Rebecca Vilkomerson, who heads Jewish Voice for Peace, which embraced the boycott movement in 2005, called the blacklist an effort “to bully and intimidate us.”

“It’s emotional, and it’s hard,” said Vilkomerson, who lives in Brooklyn. “My husband was flying home from Israel yesterday. Both his parents are 80, he was born and raised there, we’re all close. It’s the sort of classic conundrum between political principle and personal impact. I really don’t know how it’s going to play itself out.”

Vilkomerson said that while the movement’s supporters outside Israel would be affected, the biggest victims could be Palestinians living in Israel under temporary permits, including spouses of Israelis who are citizens or hold permanent residency. Under the law, citizens and permanent residents cannot lose that status for supporting the movement, but those with temporary-stay permits could have them revoked, she said.

Last March, Israel amended its Entry Law to bar anyone who actively promotes a boycott of the country. In a statement, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs said the 20 groups named Sunday had “undertaken ongoing, consistent and significant action to promote and advance a boycott of Israel.”

The ministry said the blacklist “explicitly excludes political criticism of Israel” as a criterion for inclusion on the list and was aimed at “central figures in key boycott organizations.”

Yousef Munayyer, director of the Campaign for Palestinian Rights, called the group’s inclusion a “badge of honor.”

“When Israel, which aims to portray itself to the world as liberal and democratic, blacklists activists dedicated to nonviolent organizing and dissent, it only further exposes itself as a fraud,” he said.

The blacklist’s publication shed some light on a policy that has been shrouded in secrecy and confusion.

In July, five members of an interfaith delegation were kept off their Lufthansa flight to Israel from Dulles International Airport. The five, who included a rabbi and two other members of Jewish Voice for Peace, along with members of Presbyterian and Muslim groups, were told that the Israeli government had ordered the airline not to allow them to board.

A lawyer, Eitay Mack, pressed under public-records law for copies of Israel’s instructions to Lufthansa and other foreign companies or governments.

Mack said he believed that there may be more groups on the blacklist than the 20 named Sunday, and that the government may also be compiling a blacklist of individuals to be barred from entry.

The law is being challenged on constitutional grounds, under Israel’s version of the Bill of Rights, its Basic Law on Human Dignity, adopted in 1992.

Shachar Ben Meir, a lawyer representing the plaintiff in that case, which will have its first hearing next month, said the amended Entry Law violated the Basic Law’s assurance of intellectual freedom and the freedoms of speech and conscience. Israel and its allies are fighting the boycott movement on a number of fronts worldwide. Two years ago, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu budgeted more than $25 million annually to that fight, but little has been divulged about how the money is being spent. A report in Ha’aretz uncovered more than $1 million in government contracts with law firms in Europe and the United States to oppose the movement, but details were redacted on national-security grounds.

In the United States, billionaire Sheldon Adelson is underwriting a variety of initiatives to fight the movement, including on college campuses, as polls show the Palestinian cause rapidly gaining support among young people while support for Israel is eroding.

Just how much economic damage is being done to Israel by the boycott movement is a matter of considerable debate.

Right-wing politicians and activists routinely speak of it as “economic terrorism,” but Dahlia Scheindlin, a liberal Israeli pollster, said her surveys showed that Israelis see few effects aside from the occasional celebrity canceling an appearance in Israel, as singer Lorde did last month.

“So perhaps paradoxically, they also feel resilient — there’s a ‘no one can really hurt us’ attitude,” Scheindlin said. “So far, it’s not so much the boycott itself that feels like an existential threat, but what they’re demanding and who they are.”