{"id":1985,"date":"2015-05-11T09:00:31","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T08:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/?p=1985"},"modified":"2015-05-25T16:20:44","modified_gmt":"2015-05-25T15:20:44","slug":"understanding-israel-and-palestine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/2015\/05\/11\/understanding-israel-and-palestine\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding Israel and Palestine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lauryn Hill cancelled her concert in Israel last week<\/strong>. The former Fugees singer found herself mixed up in the Israeli – Palestinian conflict by groups urging her to join the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel<\/a> which has been sputtering along since 2004.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>I also had an event in Tel Aviv last week and did not cancel it<\/strong>. I went to give a speech about the link between business strategy and geopolitics to IESE’s alumni in the country as well as prospective students. When I read about Ms. Hill’s decision not to come I decided to\u00a0dedicate this week’s posting to this very sensitive subject.<\/p>\n

Why a boycott ?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The essential idea behind the boycott is to try and bring pressure on Israeli civil society to change course and end what its organizers consider the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands<\/strong>. The organizers equate Israel and many of its policies with the former regime of South Africa and its policy of Apartheid.<\/p>\n

While, I find their reading of history and their discussion of the current situation one sided and simplistic at best, I do not think I can do justice to the complexity of the conflict\u00a0in the space available in a blog post or even a book<\/strong>. I would urge anyone who is really interested in the situation to read\u00a0Tom Friedman’s book\u00a0From Beirut to Jerusalem<\/em><\/a>\u00a0although that would only be a good place to start.<\/p>\n

The Importance of History<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ms. Hill apparently made an attempt to schedule an additional concert in Ramallah<\/a> in order to demonstrate that she does not take sides on the issues at play and then cancelled her concert near Tel Aviv when it proved impossible to set up the other one. I’m not sure how much she or the people in her organization actually know about the history of Israel and its relationship with the countries around it and the palestinian people.<\/p>\n

One of the themes of my talk in Tel-Aviv was precisely how important it is for Managers to look into the geographic, historical, and political situation <\/span><\/a> of the places they do business in.\u00a0The main reason I recommend this is in order to avoid the kind of surprises that Ms. Hill’s organization had to deal with.<\/p>\n

History, however, is a complex field and can be extremely political<\/strong>. Some even suggest that all history is biased and its very nature is one sided. I therefore encourage my students to try to see different\u00a0sides to every issue<\/strong>. Subscribe, for example, \u00a0to Al Jazeera<\/em>,<\/a> Haaretz<\/a>,<\/em> and the New York Times<\/a><\/em>.
\n\"imgres-2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The problem is people have a hard time with the complexity and ambiguity of historical and geopolitical analysis. We like things to be clear and the good guys and the bad guys to be easily identified <\/span><\/a>. We like simple narratives that catch our imagination and make us feel righteous when we take a stand. Reality is\u00a0always more complex.<\/p>\n

Whats next in Israel?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I came back from Israel last Wednesday in time to watch the Barcelona – Bayern match. While Leo Messi was demonstrating his amazing skills,\u00a0Prime Minister Benjamin\u00a0Netanyahu was agreeing to form a narrow coalition government with parties most people would classify as being of the far right. Friedman<\/a>\u00a0is deeply worried about Netanyahu’s shift to the right and his apparent rejection of a two state solution to the conflict.<\/p>\n

For me, I will continue to travel to Israel and try and learn as much as I can about the issues and different points of view.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The cancelation of a concert in Israel by Lauryn Hill underlies the importance of developing a deep understanding of history and politics for different regions of the world when doing business internationally as it appears that the pop star was caught off guard by the social media the concert generated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":788,"featured_media":1988,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[26749],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-geopolitics","megacategoria-mc-strategy"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/788"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1985"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2001,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1985\/revisions\/2001"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1988"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.iese.edu\/doing-business\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}