Watching David Cameron’s government grappling with the Israeli boycott movement reminds me of one of the brighter moments in British public life during the turbulent Thatcher years. It came whenMrs T tried to stop the Olympic squad going to the 1980 Moscow Games in protest against the recent Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The Olympic movement, including Seb (now Lord) Coe and Steve Ovett, who would both win gold medals, said no. To her credit, Thatcher did not prevent them. In this instance, Cameron is not doing as well.
Here’s the Guardian’ s account of what happened in 1980, culled years later from the Whitehall archives, complete with pressure on Coe’s truculent father and manager, Peter. It was applied by a young ministerial thruster called Douglas Hurd.
There are many layers of irony in this story which hindsight lays bare. Led by the then US president Jimmy Carter, 62 countries stayed away and 81 went. The Russians retaliated by boycotting the Los Angeles games in 1984, the US armed what became Islamist militants who eventually drove the Russians out of Afghanistan, then sucked the Americans in, and us too. We still live with the consequences.
The Olympic movement has also since lost its halo. Coe’s is a bit tarnished. Isn’t life complicated?
What I remember with satisfaction was that the US Olympic committee buckled to political pressure, but ours didn’t. It’s not about the rights and wrongs of any particular boycott, it’s about the exercise of legitimate freedoms, which we are all supposed to be defending. Just so with the Cabinet Office guidance, trailed since October but due out on Wednesday to coincide with minister Matt Hancock’s visit to Israel, that willpunish local councils, NHS trusts and universities (all publicly funded) for imposing local boycotts on the goods from countries of which they disapprove.
It’s not just about Israel, but in the context of the decade-old international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement it’s mostly about Israel. The line is that Israel is the new apartheid South Africa and deserves to be treated as severely as the latter was before Nelson Mandela and sanctions forced the old regime to blink.
Personally, I’m not convinced by that analogy and find it distasteful. I’m not an expert, however, and plenty of people I respect who know more than I do think BDS policy and more is justified by the enduring plight of the Palestinians. But I’m told that an African National Congress delegation to the occupied West Bank was uneasily divided over the comparison with their own history.
Let’s park that debate for a moment with a passing nod to the energetic efforts of the Israeli government to discredit the BDS crowd, whose ambiguity on Israel’s right to exist troubles some close observers. I think the government has that right, regardless of the obnoxious folly of Binyamin Netanyahu’s government, which embarrasses many British Jews.
The primary issue here is whether Cameron and his Cabinet Office bagmen should threaten elected local authorities and other public bodies that decide to take a foreign policy stand. There is a long history of this sort of action, not just on apartheid.
The sight and sound of leftwing Lambeth council and others grandly declaring themselves “nuclear-free zones” was one of many such acts of anti-Thatcher gesture politics in the 80s. As noted above, she wasn’t above her own “Olympic-free zone” gestures either.
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