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Will Pro-Palestinian Boycott Mobs Abandon Their iPhones and Other Devices?

An Apple iPhone. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Anti-Israel student protesters have always sought convenient, effortless ways to demonstrate their hatred for Israel.

In the past, this has meant trying to remove Sabra brand hummus from campus food services. Starting at DePaul University in 2010, efforts to embargo the Israeli-made food spread quickly to other campuses (University of Ottowa in 2014, Swarthmore College in 2018, Dickinson College in 2019, and Harvard University in 2022), but after October 7, 2023, student boycott demands grew more expansive.

It’s no longer enough to change brands of hummus. Today’s students want to ban everything from Israel.

Graduate Students at the City University of New York (CUNY), for instance, now demand not only the familiar Sabra prohibition but also a ban of “all fruits and vegetables grown in Israel.” And their list doesn’t end with food. They also demand that the entire CUNY system “cancel all forms of cooperation with Israeli academic institutions, including events, activities, agreements, and research collaborations.”

What goes unsaid here is that not a single student will ever actually live up to these demands. The rhetorical flourishes are purely for show.

If the thousands of college students calling for a boycott of all things Israel want to live up to their sanctimonious rhetoric, they will have to give up a lot more than one brand of hummus. And they will end up sick, hungry, and underemployed.

I call on all anti-Israel, pro-BDS students and faculty members alike to prove that they aren’t the posers and half-milers I say they are by following through on their categorical rejection of any contact with, use of, or compliance with, any and all Israeli technologies, companies, products, ideas, and universities.

I dare these pretenders to put their futures where their mouths are, and abandon entirely anything with the State of Israel.

It won’t be easy.

Let’s start with their cell phones. Israeli technology is central to the iPhone platform, so Apple phones are out. Unfortunately they can’t just switch to Samsung. They’ll have to give up their digital umbilical cords altogether because the cell phone was invented in 1973 by Motorola’s Israeli Research and Development Department.

And it’s not just cell phones they will have to shun. Israeli technology is integral to many modern conveniences that college students rely on. If they want to live up to their anti-Israel commitment, they will have to stop using USB ports (an Israeli invention), thumb drives (an Israeli invention) and firewalls (another Israeli invention). Writing term papers, theses, and dissertations without computers worked for centuries. They’ll adapt.

If today’s protesters ever find gainful employment outside of a few select cities, they will need a car, but they’ll have to boycott all models with cameras pointing outward. An Israeli invention called the Mobileye has been warning of obstacles and keeping drivers in their lanes for years. Mirrors work too, as committed protesters will learn.

“No fruits or vegetables from Israel,” say the CUNY student protesters. Will they also eschew all fruits and vegetables grown with Israeli technology?

Israel invented drip irrigation, which is used in almost all modern agricultural enterprises. After researching which fruits and vegetables were not grown with drip irrigation, anti-Israel protesters might find it easier just to give up fruits and vegetables. Or maybe they’ll grow their own (an unlikely scenario in New York City).

Will they boycott life-saving drugs and research developed by Israel? Multiple sclerosis is treated with a drug called Copaxone, developed at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.

It may soon be impossible to avoid Israeli NaNose technology and the “Sniff-Phone” which smells diseases before they are manifested, allowing for preventative therapies prior to the onset of symptoms. Committed Israel boycotters will have to shun this technology in favor of the old ways of detecting diseases — often when they are too advanced to treat effectively.

Many of them seem heartless too, but those who one day need heart surgery will have to forgo the flexible stent, invented at an Israeli company called Medinol. The NIR stent or EluNIR™ has become standard since its invention in 1996. Protesters who shun all things Israel might be able to find some third-world clinic willing to use the rigid stents of an earlier era. I wish them luck.

I suspect that most of the anti-Israel protests are led by faculty and students in the humanities and social sciences, where anti-Israel virtue signaling is de rigueur and comes with few repercussions. Students in other areas of specialization, however, will have to make debilitating career challenges to live up to their performative rhetoric.

Israel has the greatest number of tech companies outside of Silicon Valley, but its influence on the field extends far beyond Israel. The recent Miami Tech and Invest Conference showed the extent to which Israeli companies are “transforming Miami into a global tech hub.” Any student of computer science or software engineering, as well as any budding tech entrepreneur, will suffer greatly by boycotting all things Israel.

STEM students who refuse to work with Israeli technologies, scientists, and universities will sabotage their careers. They will likely wind up at the bottom of their professions — far from important research and Nobel Prize winners. Israeli universities and research companies are responsible for many breakthroughs in detecting and treating cancer, and Israelis have dominated the Nobel Prize in chemistry for most of the 20th century.

Naturally, none of the student demands should be taken seriously. In America today, no one virtue signals like a college student. Their hunger strikes begin after breakfast and end at lunch — so too do their demands end the moment they sign a resolution or shout in front of the camera.

Of course, I would love for just one anti-Israel, BDS, boycotting/divesting protester to prove me wrong and truly refrain from using or benefitting from anything derived from Israeli ingenuity. Write me, using pen and paper of course, and tell me how it’s going.

Chief Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) Political Correspondent A.J. Caschetta is a principal lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a fellow at Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum where he is also a Milstein fellow. A version of this article originally appeared at IPT.

The post Will Pro-Palestinian Boycott Mobs Abandon Their iPhones and Other Devices? first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Houthi Terrorists Raid UN Premises in Yemen, Detain At Least 11 People

Houthi policemen ride on the back of a patrol pick-up truck during the funeral of Houthi terrorists killed by recent US-led strikes, in Sanaa, Yemen, Feb. 10, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah

Yemen‘s Iran-backed Houthi rebels raided United Nations offices in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on Sunday and detained at least 11 UN personnel, the body said.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said the Houthis, an internationally designated terrorist group, forcibly entered World Food Program premises, seized UN property, and attempted to enter other UN offices in the capital.

The raid followed an Israeli strike on Sanaa on Thursday that killed the prime minister of Yemen‘s Houthi-run government and several other ministers.

UN Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg said in a separate statement that the 11 staff were detained in both Sanaa and the port city of Hodeidah.

UNICEF, the UN Development Program and the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees are among other UN agencies with offices in one or both of the two cities.

Grundberg said the detentions were in addition to 23 other UN staff previously detained, some since 2021, and one who died in detention this year.

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Israel Moves EU Approval for Diaspora Bond to Luxembourg From Ireland Amid Hostility Over Gaza

Anti-Israel protesters demonstrate in front of the Central Bank of Ireland against the sale of Israeli bonds throughout the EU, in Dublin, Ireland, May 27, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Clodagh Kilcoyne

Israel has moved the process of securing EU approval for its diaspora bond prospectus to Luxembourg from Ireland amid increasing opposition in Dublin to its central bank’s role in approving the program on behalf of the European Union.

Irish lawmakers and anti-Israel campaign groups have called on the central bank to stop facilitating the sale of the bonds over the last year due to Israel‘s near two-year military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.

Israel‘s diaspora bonds are relatively small and sold mainly in Jewish communities around the world to help supplement the state’s bond sales that finance its budget deficit that has risen due to the war. Israel launched a diaspora bond campaign in October 2023 to raise money amid the conflict.

Non-EU countries must choose one EU member state to apply to for approval of a prospectus where securities are traded in the EU and Ireland‘s central bank had been asked to approve Israel‘s diaspora bond program each year since 2021.

A joint committee of Irish lawmakers recommended in August that the government seek to amend EU regulations so as to allow each individual European central bank to refuse to act as the competent authority for such bond prospectuses.

Protesters have also demonstrated outside the central bank’s offices.

Ireland has been one of the fiercest critics of Israel on the international stage since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza, leading the Jewish state to shutter its embassy in Dublin.

Last year, Ireland officially recognized a Palestinian state, a decision that Israel described as a “reward for terrorism.” This year, the Irish government is drafting legislation to ban trade with territories under Israeli administration, including the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights. The measure seeks to prohibit the import of goods and services originating from what the legislation refers to as “occupied Palestinian territories,” including Israeli communities in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The Irish central bank had consistently said it is legally obliged to approve any prospectus once the relevant conditions are met.

In a letter to a lawmaker published by the central bank, Governor Gabriel Makhlouf said the approval for Israel‘s program would be transferred to Luxembourg upon the expiry of the prior year’s prospectus on Monday.

The new prospectus published on the website of Israel Bonds, the country’s borrowing vehicle for diaspora bonds, said its program for the next year had been approved by Luxembourg.

Israel‘s finance ministry did not immediately comment on the reasons for moving its EU bond prospectus approval.

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China, Russia Join Iran in Rejecting European Move to Restore Sanctions on Tehran

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian attends the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit 2025, in Tianjin, China, Sept. 1, 2025. Photo: Iran’s Presidential website/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS

UN Security Council permanent members China and Russia backed Iran on Monday in rejecting a move by European countries to reimpose UN sanctions on Tehran loosened a decade ago under a nuclear agreement.

A letter signed by the Chinese, Russian, and Iranian foreign ministers said a move by Britain, France, and Germany to automatically restore the sanctions under a so-called “snapback mechanism” was “legally and procedurally flawed.”

China and Russia were signatories to Iran‘s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, along with the three European countries, known as the E3. US President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the agreement in his first term in 2018.

The Europeans launched the “snapback mechanism” last week, accusing Iran of violating the deal, which had provided relief from international financial sanctions in return for curbs to Iran‘s nuclear program.

The letter published by Iran‘s Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi in a post on X on Monday said that the course taken by Britain, France, and Germany “abuses the authority and functions of the UN Security Council.”

Iran has long since broken through the limits on uranium production set under the 2015 deal, arguing that it is justified in doing so as a consequence of Washington having pulled out of the agreement. The deal expires in October this year, and the snapback mechanism would allow sanctions that were lifted under it to take effect again.

Iran and the E3 held talks aimed at a new nuclear agreement after Israel and the US bombed Iran‘s nuclear installations in mid-June. But the E3 deemed that talks in Geneva last week did not yield sufficient signals of readiness for a new deal from Iran.

“Our joint letter with my colleagues, the foreign ministers of China and Russia, signed in Tianjin, reflects the firm position that the European attempt to invoke snapback is legally baseless and politically destructive,” Iran‘s foreign minister said in his post on X.

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