Patricia McKeown, the President of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, has been “quoting” Nelson Mandela. “Nelson Mandela described this,” she said, referring to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “as the most important problem on this planet.”

Now, I can’t find any record of Mandela making a statement like this one. I do recall that Arjan el-Fassed, an anti-Zionist activist, once penned a fake memo from Mandela to New York Times columnist Tom Friedman which flew around the internet as the genuine article. If you read that, and believed these words to be Mandela’s, you could reasonably draw the conclusion that Mandela actually does regard this local conflict to be the most important in the world.

Whether or not Mandela says so, it’s abundantly clear that growing numbers of labor activists do believe that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the most pressing item on the agenda. Which is why ICTU - about whom we’ve reported before - is apparently stepping up its campaign for a boycott of Israeli goods. As the Belfast Telegraph reports, ICTU held a meeting hosted by the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to highlight the critical role that boycotting can play in bringing about a peaceful settlement.

One of things which bothers McKeown is that unemployment on the West Bank is skyrocketing. Quite how a boycott of Israel is supposed to alleviate this is something she doesn’t explain. I wonder what advice she would offer the Palestinian Authority, which has just commissioned an Israeli company, via an agent in East Jerusalem, to design a computerized management system for Palestinian hospitals. Because it’s joint projects like these which create jobs and further the incentive to think about economic reconstruction.

But then, that misses the point of the boycott. It’s not about improving the situation and it is grossly dishonest to pretend otherwise. Boycotting is - among many other considerations - a form of gesture politics. Anyone who takes it seriously isn’t worth taking seriously.