Some of you are familiar with the "Deadly Exchange" allegation -- an effort by JVP and allied groups to block cross-training programs between Israeli and American police officers on the grounds that such programs really are just avenues for Israel to transmit brutality and oppression to their American counterparts. It's a signature campaign of the BDS movement, albeit one that -- like most BDS activities -- hasn't gotten much traction.
But today comes the news that Itamar Ben-Gvir, the notorious far-right racist who also happens to be Israel's National Security Minister, has taken it upon himself to bar Israeli police from partaking in programs run by the Wexner Foundation for Jewish Leadership. Wexner programs have hosted an array of significant figures in Israel's security establishment, but as is becoming increasingly passe they have come under predictable fire from the Israeli right upon allegations that they are a tool of leftist indoctrination and the ever-shadowy "deep state". So a ban was announced, and yet another screen of isolation falls upon the Israeli public vis-a-vis the outside world (and here, in particular, the Jewish diaspora world).
The Wexner programs are not, to be sure, exactly the sorts of police cross-training programs that "deadly exchange" targets. Nonetheless, this is yet another data point to the proposition that Israeli right is far more successful at actually instantiating a BDS regime than BDS activists ever have been.
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