These trends notwithstanding, BDS has not been entirely without success. In addition to the SodaStream affair and similar intimidation of Israeli companies, some international corporations have reportedly reduced their footprint in Israel. The French utilities company Veolia, after being targeted by the BDS movement for six years (including a boycott of the company by Tower Hamlets Borough Council in London), announced last year that it was ending its activities in Israel.

One cannot discount the possibility of further concealed boycotts, whereby companies quietly decline to do business in Israel, ostensibly under commercial pretexts but in reality to avoid adverse publicity. But in general BDS victories have been fleeting. In 2015, the CEO of French telecoms giant Orange declared in Egypt that his company should be boycotting Israel — even though Orange itself does not operate there, instead enfranchising a local company to use its name. Nevertheless, his announcement generated a great deal of publicity and applause from the BDS crowd. It also brought significant opposition, prompting him to visit Israel the following week to apologise. Soon afterwards, his company quietly made a sizeable investment there.

This sort of noise over action has also been true of the numerous boycotts of Israel by trade unions, including, in Britain, the Trade Union Congress, the Fire Brigade Union, Unite, Unison, the GMB and the National Union of Journalists. Elsewhere, unions in Ireland, Canada, South Africa, Sweden, Norway, California and Australia have endorsed or carried out boycotts in some form. Religious institutions, such as the Church of England synod, the British Methodist Church and the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA) have voted in favour of boycotts or divestment, and local councils in the UK, including Leicester City Council in England, Swansea and Gwynedd Councils in Wales, and several in Scotland, have passed boycott motions. In Iceland, the Reykjavik city council voted to boycott all of Israel, before reversing itself to limit the boycott to the West Bank.

These boycotts have minimal direct economic effect. In the case of local council procurement, for instance, the boycotting councils did not generally make purchases from Israel or Israeli companies in the first place, so the impact of their resolutions tended to be merely symbolic. Also more symbolically than commercially damaging are cultural boycotts, which have seen various performers and others in the arts, including Lauryn Hill, Annie Lennox, Elvis Costello and Danny Glover, not go to Israel.

The success of these cultural boycotts should certainly not be overstated, though: few celebrities have heeded the call, and some have actively opposed it. For example, in response to a pro-boycott petition last February, in a letter to the Guardian in October J.K. Rowling, Simon Schama, Hilary Mantel, Melvyn Bragg and others declared their opposition to a cultural boycott of Israel.