Benjamin Netanyahu will hardly have noticed that Edinburgh City Council has voted to boycott Israel. Last week, Edinburgh councillors passed a motion proposed by a Scottish Green member that aims to align Scotland’s capital city with the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

The motion condemns the “Israeli government’s genocidal regime in Palestine” and follows the vote earlier this month by the Scottish Parliament for an “immediate package of boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions targeted at the state of Israel”. The First Minister, John Swinney, has promised to halt any involvement of public money in companies operating in Scotland with links to the Israeli military.

But do the councillors who backed this BDS motion know quite what they are boycotting? Are they intending to frustrate the operation of some of Edinburgh and Scotland’s largest firms? One of the city’s biggest financial institutions, investment manager Baillie Gifford, has investments in a number of companies, including Amazon, Nvidia and Meta, which, according to activist group Fossil Free Books, have “commercial dealings with the state of Israel”. Indeed, it was FFB which forced the Edinburgh International Book Festival to cut its lucrative links with the firm two years ago.

Then there is the Royal Bank of Scotland, which, trading as NatWest, has been involved in underwriting a £500 million bond issuance by Ithaca Energy, a subsidiary of the Israeli-owned Delek Group. Castle Precision Engineering, another firm allegedly involved in laser-targeting systems for F-35 jets, has offices in Glasgow and Edinburgh. It has been targeted recently by pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

Swinney’s recent promise to boycott companies linked to Israeli defence was similarly misconceived. Ithaca Energy is based in Aberdeen. Babcock International, which owns Rosyth Dockyard in Fife, has worked in partnership with Israeli arms companies. So have Leonardo, Thales, Raytheon and BAE Systems, which all have operations in Scotland and together account for a large proportion of the country’s ever-declining industry. In fact, it is sometimes hard to find companies which have not, in some way or other, had links with firms in Israel. Even the Church of Scotland owns hotels in Tiberias and Jerusalem.

But the ignorant blackballing of Scottish companies is not the real problem with BDS. The campaign is very specifically aligned with the objectives of Hamas, a terrorist organisation responsible for the worst pogrom suffered by Jews since the Holocaust — in October 2023. It seeks to use economic attrition to force Israel not only to withdraw from the occupied territories and cease the war against Hamas in Gaza, but also to explicitly promote “the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties”. This right of return is incompatible, in the eyes of many Jewish organisations, with the very existence of the state of Israel.

Moreover, since the founders of BDS regard Israel as an “apartheid state”, it arguably conflicts with the working definition of antisemitism promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. This was formally adopted by the Scottish Government in 2017. It means that by adopting BDS, both the Scottish Government and Edinburgh Council are promoting an antisemitic organisation.

Edinburgh City Council has a minority Labour administration coexisting with a large number of Green and SNP councillors. Like the rest of Scotland it tends to be more progressive than the rest of the UK on issues of human rights, though the difference should not be exaggerated. Immigration is emerging as a key political issue in Scotland as indicated by the rise of Reform UK, which is expected to elect a raft of MSPs in next year’s Holyrood elections.

So while the councillors are being emboldened by a progressive SNP government in Holyrood, that may not be the case next year. A more cautious Scottish Labour government in Holyrood would be nervous about such acts, as has been the case in Westminster.

It is not for councillors to take sides in foreign wars, however horrific and abominable the human suffering caused. Edinburgh’s boycott of Israel is an empty exercise in gesture politics from a council that would be better advised to stick to emptying bins and filling potholes.

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Iain Macwhirter was political commentator for The Herald between 1999 and 2022, and is the author of Disunited Kingdom: How Westminster Won a Referendum But Lost Scotland. He was Rector of the University of Edinburgh from 2009-12.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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