Arab League boycott of Israel

An official organized boycott of the Yishuv (pre-state Jewish community in Palestine) was adopted by the Arab League in December 1945, and persisted against Israel after its establishment in 1948.

[3] Egypt (1979), the Palestinian Authority (1993), Jordan (1994), Bahrain (2020), UAE (2020), Sudan (2020) and Morocco (2020), signed peace treaties or agreements that ended their participation in the boycott of Israel.

[5] In subsequent years and decades, the boycott was sporadically applied and ambiguously enforced, and therefore no longer has significant effect on the Israeli or Arab economies.

[8] On 2 December 1945, the newly formed Arab League, then comprising six members, issued its first call for an economic boycott of the Jewish community of Palestine.

After the Partition Plan of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 29 November 1947, efforts to apply the boycott were intensified.

On 6 February 1950, King Farouk of Egypt issued a decree under which manifests and cargoes of ships could be searched to ensure that no "war contraband" was present on vessels bound directly or indirectly for Israel.

However, article 10 additionally stipulated that other goods were to be considered "contraband" and were to be treated as war material — ships, chemicals, motor vehicles, money, gold, and fuel of any kind.

To enforce the policy of denying strategic goods to Israel, the decree authorized the use of force against any ship attempting to avoid search, including live gunfire, to make it submit to inspection.

On 8 April 1950, the Arab League Council embraced this shift, approving a decision by its political committee to the effect that all ships carrying goods or immigrants to Israel were to be blacklisted.

The United Nations Security Council issued a resolution which condemned the Egyptian practice as an "abuse of the exercise of the right of visit, search and seizure."

On 28 November 1953, Egypt increased expanded its list of "contraband" to include "foodstuffs and all other commodities likely to strengthen the potential of the Zionists in Palestine in any way whatsoever.

The position of Boycott Commissioner was created to direct the CBO and deputies were appointed, who were to function as liaison officers accredited by each member state of the Arab League.

During Israel's early years it was seen by the USSR as a potential ally due to the significant socialist aspirations advocated by its founders and applied in its conception.

Instead, the Soviet Union would form an alliance with the revolutionary Arab regimes, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and later in the decade Iraq, united in anti-American and anti-Israel political objectives.

Others strove to cultivate good personal relationships with Arab leaders, who would allow them to trade with Israel without economic repercussions in their own countries as a favor.

In addition, Israel supporters in some Western countries managed to get anti-boycott laws passed, but they typically went unenforced everywhere except the United States.

[16] In 1977 the United States Congress passed a law that President Jimmy Carter signed, which made it a criminal offense to adhere to the boycott and imposed fines on American companies that were found to be complying with it.

In other cases, foreign companies would purchase Israeli technology and materials, use them to assemble completed products, and export them to Arab countries while concealing this fact from their customers.

[17] As the boycott was relaxed (or rather, not as stringently enforced) starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s, many companies which previously stayed out of the Israeli market had entered it, e.g. McDonald's and Nestlé.

For example, before the Gulf War (1990–91) the United States sought to form a military coalition that included Arab countries to confront Saddam Husein’s Iraq following his invasion of Kuwait.

With the vast majority of Arab states benefiting from trade with Israel, any "boycott" has become symbolic in nature, limited to bureaucratic slights such as passport restrictions.

Today, 15 of the 22 members of the Arab League — Algeria, Comoros, Djibouti, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen — do not recognise or have diplomatic relations with Israel; with the exceptions being Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates.

At Arab League urging, a further 9 members of Organisation of Islamic Cooperation also do not have diplomatic relations with Israel — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brunei, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Mali, Niger, and Pakistan.

Thirteen countries do not accept Israeli passports:[26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] Algeria, Bangladesh, Brunei, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen.

In addition, seven of these countries — Iran,[37] Kuwait,[38] Lebanon,[39] Libya,[40] Syria[41] and Yemen[42] — do not allow entry to people with evidence of travel to Israel, or whose passports have either a used or an unused Israeli visa.

[8] Israel's economy has performed relatively well since 1948, achieving a higher GDP per capita than that of all Arab countries except for the oil-rich gulf states of Kuwait and Qatar.

In its report on the cost of conflict in the Middle East, Strategic Foresight Group estimates that Arab states lost an opportunity to export $10 billion worth of goods to Israel between 2000 and 2010.

Moreover, the Arab states of the Persian Gulf and Iran together stand to lose $30 billion as the opportunity cost of not exporting oil to Israel in the second half of the decade.

A similar situation existed in the Arab world which boycotted the products of companies that were selling in Israel as in the case of Coca-Cola, Ford and Revlon.

[60] Conduct that may be penalized under the TRA and/or prohibited under the EAR includes: Of all the Western countries, only the United Kingdom has not passed legislation against the Arab boycott.