A BDS Israel protest in London. Photo: Wiki Commons.

A leading supporter of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement has conceded that the growth of western trade with Israel shows the “limits” of the strategy – and suggests, instead, that activists turn their ire upon the political influence of the “Israel Lobby.”

“BDS, in some ways, detracts from directly dealing with the real problem: the foreign policy of the West has been seriously corrupted by Israeli influence, almost wherever you look,” wrote Alastair Sloan, a left-wing British journalist, on the website of Middle East Monitor (MEMO,) a pro-Hamas outlet based in London. MEMO’s director is Dr. Daud Abdullah, a signatory of the so-called “Istanbul Declaration” of 2010, which  lauded Hamas as the “Resistance against the Jewish Zionist occupation.” MEMO’s staff includes Ben White, a long-serving Hamas propagandist who has stated, “I do not consider myself an anti-Semite, yet I can also understand why some are.”

Sloan’s article – entitled “Western trade to (sic) Israel is on the rise, is BDS really working?” – notes that “figures released this week show that UK-Israel trade actually grew by 28 per cent year-on-year in the first half of 2014, now amounting to £2.5 billion.”

“There may be successes here and there, but the machine of modern commerce is an extremely hard one to slow,” Sloan said.

Sloan praised the BDS movement for “educating the public,” but then added, revealingly: “Ultimately, we don’t know whether it will make things worse and, as a pro-sanctions or boycott movement, it doesn’t yet have a successful precedent or contemporary model for success – just look at North Korea, Iran, Russia or indeed the porous Arab boycott against Israel.” (The “Arab boycott of Israel” was in fact launched against the Jewish community in British Mandate Palestine in 1945, three years before the creation of the Jewish state.)

“Aside from the uncertain and potentially dangerous side-effects of BDS, we are ignoring the bigger problem,” Sloan continued. “The crux of bringing the Israeli hawks to heel isn’t so much about corporate investments – it’s about political money, dripping from the campaign coffers of Western politicians bribed and briefed by Jerusalem cronies.” Sloan then went on to advocate for the “dismantling” of the “Israel Lobby,” without explaining exactly what this would involve or how such an outcome would be achieved.

Leading Jewish blogger Elder of Ziyon was unequivocal about the anti-Semitic nature of Sloan’s article.

“Sloan is saying that there is a mysterious powerful Jewish cabal that secretly controls Western governments and media and forces them to do the nefarious will of the Zionists against their own best interests. He is so scared of it himself that he cannot bring himself to say the word ‘Jewish,’ but his audience knows very well what he means. ‘Jerusalem cronies,’ wink-wink,” Elder wrote, pointing out that Sloan also contributes to The Guardian, The Independent and The Huffington Post.