JERUSALEM — Coca-Cola for years has been a staple in Tel Aviv. But Damascus and Abu Dhabi belong to the Pepsi generation. You can buy Subarus and Mitsubishis in downtown Jerusalem. But if you want one of the two best-selling Japanese cars in the world, Toyota and Nissan, you must fly to Riyadh or Bahrain.
In the Arab world, you can't watch productions starring Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra, longtime supporters of Israel, on television and movie screens.
In Jerusalem, you can't buy a Toshiba computer, unless it was brought in by a third party. You also can't fly Japan Air Lines to Ben-Gurion Airport. You can't even get there via EgyptAir, which officially made peace with Israel in 1979 but had to create a special carrier to fly from Cairo to Tel Aviv.
In fact, there are many things you can't do because of the Arab League's boycott of Israel.
No economic sanctions in the world have persisted longer than this 45-year-old attempt by the Arab world to strike back across the Jordan River in a place where bullets and missiles could not reach.
Since even before Israel's birth in 1948, and more so since, the Arab states have doggedly pursued the economic ruin of the Jewish state, banning not only investment and trade with Israeli companies but in many cases with international firms which do business with Israel.
"Unlike other economic sanctions employed in modern history, the Arab boycott is unique in that it does not seek to modify a state's behavior, but rather it aims to erase a state from the map. As such, the boycott is a form of blatant economic warfare," the Israeli Foreign Ministry said in a recent report, which called the boycott "the longest-lasting attempt to coerce and destroy a sovereign state by non-military means."
But now Israeli officials hope that the conclusion of the Persian Gulf War may have opened the first important cracks in the boycott, as the coalition against Iraq responds to U.S. pressure to implement the kind of real-world "confidence-building measures" that American officials say are necessary to assure any kind of lasting peace in the Middle East.
Kuwait, which for decades maintained one of the most zealous, well-staffed boycott enforcement offices in the region, is no longer requiring boycott compliance clauses in contracts for reconstruction.
