The Israeli media frequently reports BDS successes, and Israeli politicians and commentators speak regularly about the continued rapid growth of the BDS movement.
In June 2013, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared the BDS movement a “strategic threat” to Israel’s regime of oppression and has assigned the overall responsibility for fighting BDS to the ministry of strategic affairs.
The former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak admits that BDS is reaching a “tipping point.”
The Israeli government has recently allocated at least 25 million dollars to combat BDS, in addition to allocating massive resources to its intelligence services for fighting the movement.
There are now dedicated anti-BDS staff at many of Israel’s overseas embassies in the west.
Knowing that it has lost the argument in many spheres, Israel has resorted to lobbying supportive governments and legislatures in the West to take steps to make BDS illegal or repress BDS activism. These McCarthyite steps have only strengthened the resolve of the BDS movement and brought it further into the public eye.
In 2011 the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, passed a draconian law to punish Israeli citizens that support a boycott of Israel or any of its companies and institutions, even those that operate in the OPT.
A small and gradually growing number of Israelis now support BDS and a growing number of public figures and ordinary Israelis are calling for policy changes in response to the growing impact of BDS.