Governments targeted by transnational boycotts typically confront a difficult choice. On the one hand, the economic consequences of boycott actions are likely to be small, or even negligible. More than anything else, the boycotters need publicity. Often the best way to convince potential boycott supporters to give money and time to the effort is to show that the target of the boycott is worried by it and is devoting real resources to combatting it. For these reasons, target governments will be tempted to do what they can to ignore boycotts or belittle the challenges they are presumed to pose. Taking such a stand also has the attraction of not having to engage substantively with, and thereby give attention to, the critiques of the target government’s policies that fuel support for the boycott movement. On the other hand, this strategy of avoidance and minimization risks giving boycotters opportunities, unopposed, to transform the terms of debate over the target government’s policies with appeals, questions, and information that may mold the political and discursive landscapes to be more receptive to radical critiques, thereby laying the groundwork for weighty challenges in the future if the campaign builds power and the target does not change its policies. The paper discusses this policy conundrum as Israel has encountered it in the context of the BDS movement. The analysis suggests that Israel’s response should be understood as a typical response for any target: to hesitate to confront boycotters, then to over-react, but to do so by manipulative, ad hominem, and semi-clandestine measures rather than by confronting and contradicting substantive critiques of policies. The key conceptual and theoretical equipment will be drawn from Antonio Gramsci’s distinction between four different kinds of political contestation and change: molecular change, normal political struggle, wars of maneuver, and wars of position. These categories are used to locate BDS within a broader arena of political contestation and develop a theory of how boycotts operate in relation to other forms of struggle.