To a certain extent, the whole boycott issue is a giant red herring, a distraction from some truly difficult and important issues. Regardless of one’s viewpoint on Israel, regardless of whether one approves or disapproves of boycotts of Israel or of any other country, no one is absolved from taking an ethical stance in one’s life. Whom to work with, what to buy, what to read, listen to or watch – these are all decisions that should be taken with regard to the ethical consequences of one’s actions. Boycotting makes these decisions easy when they shouldn’t be and there is danger that boycotts can be ethically infantilising. But disapproving of boycotts either in general or in a particular case doesn’t mean that everything is permissible.

In the case of Israel, the idea of boycotting all of Israeli society is abhorrent. At the same time, there are sections within Israeli society that I would not consider working with or supporting in any way. I wouldn’t ever want the Israeli arms industry to benefit from my actions, in the same way that I would never want to invest in an arms company anywhere in the world. I wouldn’t want to be associated with a construction company that built homes in the occupied territories. There are also more difficult decisions to be made. Do I, as a sociologist specialising in Jewish issues, collaborate with those Israeli sociologists and demographers who have described the Israeli Arab minority as a ‘demographic threat’?

These sorts of decisions are part of what it means to be an ethnical, thinking human being. In the sound and fury of the boycott debate, the importance of ethnical decision-making has been lost amid the posturing. There is an air of complacency to many of the campaigners on both sides, when what is really needed is leadership as to how we should respond to difficult issues.