Boycott: No Israeli Magic for Egyptian Cellphones

Lest you think the Arab boycott of Israeli goods has passed from the earth, rest assured that it has not – and its latest victim is Israeli cellphone application maker Trixcell. This is the company that makes professional-looking magic tricks for cellphones that anyone can do. I’ve interviewed the guys from Trixcell (Shlomi Grandes and Menny Lindenfeld, who is a world-renowned professional magician) a couple of times, and have written a couple of articles and blog posts about them.

The tricks are really good (check out the videos on their site), and what’s most amazing to me is that this is the first time in history that sleight of hand is now possible for everyone; before, you had to spend weeks, if not years, perfecting the kinds of tricks you can perform using your cellphone and Trixcell’s illusions. What Photoshop did for graphic art and Quark xPress did for page layout, Trixcell is doing for magic – namely, putting it in the grasp of the non-professional, thus breathing new life into it and opening up many more markets for the profession.

But in my latest conversation with the Trixcell guys, they told me that their applications – which are sold in 90 countries around the world – have been banned in Egypt, because someone figured out that they were an Israeli company. Apparently they left the name of one of their developers in the credits of an application, and an Egyptian customer of Mobinil, the country’s largest cell service provider, complained that there were Israelis involved in the tricks. Not wishing to seem too “Jew-loving,” apparently, Mobinil dumped the Trixcell tricks. Grandes told me that it never occurred to him and Lindenfeld to hide the origins of their applications, and they had no intention of doing so either. He also told me a couple of things I promised not repeat; his official comment was “Israel has a peace treaty with Egypt, and even if they criticize Israel there, Trixcell only deals with business, not politics, so it’s a very unfortunate reaction on their part.”

Egyptians may be willing to boycott Israeli magic tricks – and Ariel detergent, since it shares a name with a former Israeli prime minister, and has a logo sort of looks like a Star of David (Proctor and Gamble, no stranger to logo lunacy, changed Ariel’s logo in order to de-emphasize the ‘Israeli’ connection). Maybe none use Motorola phones, because of the company’s Israeli connections, preferring Nokias or Sony-Ericssons.

But how do they handle Intel? I mean, since most of Intel’s processors were designed at least partly in Israel (nearly all of the company’s laptop processors were), and since so many computers carry an “Intel Inside” logo, what computers do Arab Israel-haters use? AMD? Well, some boycott sites do instruct their lackeys to do just that. But then, they probably didn’t hear about AMD’s eventual intention to open a research center in Israel, since “AMD considers Israel as a center of knowledge and innovation, and we do consider making a strategic investment here.” But you have to believe that at least some people – even among those advocating boycotts of Israel – are using Intel-based computers. If you ask me, it’s chutzpah of the first degree – using the computer or laptop brought to you by Israeli brainpower to advocate a boycott of that same Israeli product! Bizarro!