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Tuesday, August 13, 2019

Palestinian Foreign Affairs Ministry published BDS guidelines that criticizes its own government

The Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has a webpage that appears to be a copy and paste of guidelines and philosophy from the BDS movement.

Bizarrely, it criticizes the government it is a part of:

The security aspect: The [Zionist] entity is linked to shameful security agreements with the PNA [Palestinian National Authority] and the surrounding Arab countries.
There is no way that the PA would write such a statement slamming its own positions and those of its Arab neighbors.

The entire Foreign Ministry website is amateurish and seemingly only a skeleton of a site; it doesn't have any news since 2016 and the entire page describing its vision states:
The overall vision of the ministry is to make the Palestinian issue an influential and determined element in international diplomacy.

This is probably because the PLO handles all foreign affairs, not the PA which is domestic.

The BDS page states its objectives. Based on the numbers given, it appears to have been written in 2015 or so. It seems laughable now:

The boycott will create economic, social and academic isolation, and this will have serious repercussions on [Israel] and will help undermine it.
The boycott in its advanced stages will result in hundreds of thousands of Zionists losing their jobs and will be forced to reverse migration from within the entity to the outside, in search of the welfare they have lost.
Economic Goals:
The per capita income in the Zionist entity (population of 8 million people) is approximately 35 thousand dollars and is ranked 41 in the world, and if the Zionist economy is affected negatively, per capita income will decline.

Boycotting the Zionist entity will cause it to lose tens of billions of dollars annually from investment, as well as from annual income, and will lead to a significant reduction in the tax revenues earned by the entity.

Academic Objectives:
Depriving the Zionist occupation of benefiting from the scientific expertise, grants and privileges offered by prestigious universities, and communicating with scholars and academic professors, in order to pressure the occupation to stop its arbitrary practices against educational institutions and Palestinian students.
Since this was written, Israel's GDP has increased to $41,000 per capita and it has risen from a rank of 41 to 22 in the world. 

Even though I believe that BDS' goals are not economic but propaganda, the failure of its economic program has been stunning when looked upon from this perspective.

Note also that this document's primary wish for this BDS plan was to force Jews to move out of Israel.

The website itself is testimony to how little the PA has bothered in building its own institutions. The site exists to make it appear like there is a government doing normal governmental jobs, but like so many other PA government sites we have looked at, it is just smoke and mirrors.





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