The chief executive of a French telecommunications company made an extraordinary personal pilgrimage to Israel on Friday to apologize to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after the executive’s recent declaration that he wanted to disentangle from an Israeli mobile provider prompted a diplomatic uproar, reports The New York Times.
The executive, Stéphane Richard, the chairman of the French company Orange, said that his statement had been “distorted and misunderstood” as part of a growing movement to boycott companies that operate in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
As he had earlier, Mr. Richard said on Friday that the comment he made in Cairo last week, about wishing he could end Orange’s licensing agreement with Partner Communications of Israel “tomorrow morning,” was purely a business matter.
“I regret deeply this controversy, and I want to make totally clear that Orange as a company has never supported and will never support any kind of boycott against Israel,” Mr. Richard told Mr. Netanyahu on Friday. “Israel is a fantastic place to be in the digital industry, and, of course, our will is to strengthen and to keep on investing here.”
The contretemps over Orange has shifted the boycott conversation in Israel and elsewhere. Before now, the highest-profile campaigns have taken aim mainly at factories in West Bank settlements, but Partner Communications, which uses the Orange name, is based in Israel proper and has only minimal operations in the settlements. That has led to concern that almost all Israeli businesses could face similar challenges, and it has prompted angry claims from Mr. Netanyahu and others that all boycotts are anti-Semitic attempts to undermine the Jewish state’s very existence.
The prime minister initially denounced Mr. Richard’s statement as “miserable” and rejected his initial offer to apologize to Israel’s ambassador to France, insisting that Mr. Richard must come to Israel instead. The two men stood together Friday morning in front of four Israeli flags.
“It’s no secret that the remarks you made last week were widely seen as an attack on Israel, and so your visit here is an opportunity to set the record straight,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “We seek a genuine and secure peace with our Palestinian neighbors, but that can only be achieved through direct negotiations between the parties without preconditions. It will not be achieved through boycotts and through threats of boycotts.”
Omar Barghouti, a founder of the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, or B.D.S., called Mr. Richard “obsequious” and said his company’s decision to curtail its deal with Partner in 2025 was more important than what he “is intimidated into saying.” Mr. Barghouti said the boycott was “reaching a tipping point, mainly because of its compelling moral argument and strategic campaigning.”
Also on Friday, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that KLP Kapitalforvaltning, a Norwegian insurance giant, had dropped two building-materials companies from its investment portfolio because of their activities in West Bank quarries, saying “this activity constitutes an unacceptable risk of violating fundamental ethical norms.”
Mr. Richard’s recent remarks have proved to be a watershed moment for the decade-old boycott movement, if only for the backlash they have provoked. Israeli politicians have rushed to microphones to pledge allegiance against boycotts, and many American officials and Jewish leaders have joined the chorus, in some cases obscuring their criticism of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians.
Mr. Netanyahu pledged $26 million to fight back, and Sheldon Adelson, the conservative casino mogul, reportedly raised $20 million in private donations at a meeting in Las Vegas. Ayelet Shaked, Israel’s new far-right justice minister, said she had instructed her international department to “prepare a plan of legal steps” against the boycott movement.
Industry and agriculture based in the settlements account for only a small portion of Israel’s total economic output and exports. But Israel’s broader economy tends to blur the Green Line that separates pre-1967 Israel from the territory it captured in the war that year. Like Partner Communications, many if not most Israel companies — chain restaurants and stores, insurance providers, banks — serve the roughly 600,000 Israelis who now live beyond the line.
“If you’re a consumer business, are you going to write them off? I don’t think so,” said Jon Medved, a venture capitalist who has seeded scores of start-ups. “Everyone has to do business there.”