Earlier this month, The Scotsman reported that US presidential hopeful Hilary Clinton had tried to stop a cultural boycott of Israel in Edinburgh.
In 2009, the Edinburgh film festival returned small amount of funding from the Israeli embassy sensitivity that Israel and its supporters have to BDS.. Famed left-wing director Ken Loach had been a prominent figure in the campaign.
The festival later admitted accepting the £300 was "a mistake" and publicly returned the money.
But newly published emails revealed this month that Clinton, a strong supporter of Israel, had tried to intervene in the affair. (Her emails were released as part of the ongoing controversy in the US over her use of a personal email account to conduct official business in an apparent attempt to avoid freedom of information law.)
Addressing some of her top advisers and a leader in the US Israel lobby, she emailed asking them if they could "reach out to the community in London and Edinburgh to urge them to raise this w PM [Gordon] Brown and other govt officials? We’d like to see top down and bottom up pressure. Let me know what you think."
The revelations have led BDS activists to condemn Clinton's meddling. A Scottish Green Party spokesperson told The Scotsman:"Cultural boycotts are not censorship - they have an important role to play in expressing global political opposition to the illegal occupation of Palestine and the treatment of its people. The importance of such action is made all the clearer when we see that the US has been acting behind the scenes to pressurise other countries to interfere on behalf of the Israeli Government.”
The Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign said: "Clinton’s emails demonstrate that the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign is working. Not only did Israel suffer a PR humiliation back in 2009 when its sponsorship money was publicly returned, but it now learns that, in spite of the efforts of the second-most powerful official in the US, neither the UK nor the Scottish governments were willing or able to intervene on Israel’s behalf."
US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel also condemned Clinton's interference.
I'd like to make two points on why this revelation is significant.
Firstly, it demonstrates, yet again, the sensitivity that Israel and its supporters have to BDS.
The actual sum involved not very significant, financially speaking. But morally speaking, it was massively significant, because it meant the festival was tainted by association with a state that systematically enforces a racist regime against the Palestinians and carries out regular massacres against the indigenous people of the region.
Sending back the money sent an extremely important message which the Israel lobby was outraged about, because they thought it would cause damage to Israel's standing.