The battlefield is Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, but this is no Mickey Mouse confrontation.
Israel is adamant that its exhibit at Disney's Millennium Village, which opens on October 1st, must showcase Jerusalem as its capital city. Arab leaders are adamant that it must not, since the permanent status of Jerusalem has yet to be resolved in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
After some Arab groups threatened an Arab boycott of all Disney products, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, nephew of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, claimed yesterday that Disney had backed down - and that the Israeli exhibit, to which Israel contributed $1.8 million, no longer included an explicit reference to Jerusalem as the country's capital.
It was no longer necessary to go through with the boycott threat, said the prince, himself a shareholder in the Paris Euro Disney, since this would merely "impact our image negatively in the United States". Curiously, though, Israel is also claiming victory in the spat. Anyone visiting the exhibit, said an Israeli Foreign Ministry official, would be left in "no doubt" that Jerusalem was Israel's capital.
Although the village is not intended to serve as a political statement, any reference to Jerusalem in this kind of international forum is highly sensitive, since Israel claims the whole city as its capital, and the Palestinians claim the eastern sector, including the Old City, as theirs.
The Arab threat to boycott Disney over the exhibit is one of spate of such threats recently. In the past few weeks, similar threats persuaded Burger King to sever ties with one of its franchises at a West Bank Jewish settlement, and also prompted the Ben & Jerry's ice cream firm to cease using water from the disputed Golan Heights.