Wonder Woman vs. the Boycott Bully
Sheda tear for the antiI sr aelBDS movement. It isn’t easy selling the dreariness of boycotts, divestments and sanctions when you’re up against Hollywood and some of the sexiest people on the planet.
BDS’s latest target has been Wonder Woman, the US $650- million blockbuster starring Gal Gadot, dubbed Israel’s No. 1 export. If the high-profile yet perennially failing BDS campaign thought it would end its losing streak by taking on this quintessential Israeli — Gadot is a former combat trainer for the Israeli Defense Forces who speaks with an Israeli accent and is unabashedly proud of her country — it could not have been more surprised. Not only have BDS protests fallen flat in t he West, many Muslim and Arab countries have screened what has become one of the biggest blockbusters in Hollywood history.
Worse forBDS, stats quantify the thorough drubbing it’s taking. An online study of Gadot’s popularity by the audience data analyst company Taykey found 95 per cent of mentions were positive, four per cent were neutral and only one per cent were negative. In another stunning metric, movie- review site Rotten Tomatoes credits her charisma for the film’s whopping 92 per cent rating. In a third, a survey taken of single men, the Israeli accent is now deemed to have become the world’s sexiest. Warner Brothers shrewdly capitalized on Gadot’s Israeli accent by having the other Amazons in the film sound Israeli.
BDS’s irrelevance to the world of entertainment was also on display this week through Mariah Carey, in Israel to promote her Dead Sea line of cosmetics. “We can call (my relationship with Israel) a love affair,” she said at a Tel Aviv press conference Monday. “I’m just so happy to be back in the Holy Land.” In dismissing a question about the Israeli boycott movement, she added, “I don’t care what other people say about different political things that don’t pertain to my life.”
Other performers aren’t just indifferent to the BDS movement, they’re hostile to it. “It’s deeply disrespectful to assume that we’re either being misinformed or that we’re so retarded we can’t make these decisions ourselves. I thought it was patronizing in the extreme,” British rocker Thom Yorke told Rolling Stone magazine, referring to demands that his band Radiohead cancel its performances in Israel. “It’s offensive and I just can’t understand why going to play a rock show or going to lecture at a university (is a problem to them).” Radiohead will be performing for the ninth time in Tel Aviv next month.
For a brief period in 2010, during a high- stakes drama when an NGO “f reedom flotilla” decided to defy Israel’s insistence on searching ships entering Gaza for arms, there were a spate of cancellations by performers such as Elvis Costello. But most performers even then refused to be cowed. Rihanna, Joan Armatrading and Metallica were among those who performed in the leadup to the confrontation and Elton John soon after. “Ain’t nobody gonna stop us from coming here,” John told a sold- out Tel Aviv crowd to wild applause, saying that, as a musician, his job was to spread love and peace. For good measure, he characterized performers who got on their high horse as sanctimonious hypocrites, adding “we don’t cherry- pick our conscience.”
John continued a tradition of entertainers bucking the bullies who would tell them where they can and can’t perform. “I got explicit death threats, but I have no intention of surrendering. I refuse to cancel my performances in Israel,” Paul McCartney said in 2008, prior to playing to 40,000 fans in a mutual love- in. “I do what I think and I have many friends who support Israel.” Others who have braved — or brushed off — the BDS bullies include Alicia Keys, Madonna, Justin Bieber, Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones, Barbra Streisand, Katy Perry, Kanye West, Justin Timberlake, Rod Stewart and Lady Gaga. Britney Spears plays in Israel next week, followed by the Pixies, Guns N’ Roses, Bryan Adams and Celine Dion.
The BDS movement does have a following among antiSemites and the hard left, both grim subsets of the general population. But BDS has failed to make Israel a pariah among entertainers, who signal to many what’s in and what’s not. Israel is in. BDS is not. It succeeds mostly in making a pariah of itself.