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| Ayelet Sheked |
The boycott and divestment sanctions movement is the new anti-Semitism and wants to destroy Israel, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said Wednesday, in response to a motion to the agenda from coalition and opposition MKs calling to fight those who seek to delegitimize Israel.
The discussion was marked by shouting matches over whether BDS is an anti-Israel and anti-Semitic movement or simply seeks to bring an end to Israel's presence in areas liberated in 1967.
"BDS opposes Israel as the Jewish state. It wants to blacken us and destroy us as a Jewish and democratic state," Shaked explained. "The boycotters don't talk about Judea and Samaria, they talk about the state of Israel."
According to Shaked "it's not politically correct to be anti-Semitic today, but it's super-in to be anti-Israel," and as such, "people used to delegitimize the Jews and now they do it to our state."
"BDS is anti-Semitism in new clothes," she added.
Shaked called to fight back against BDS and "boycott the boycotters" and listed the many government ministries, including hers, that are taking part in the efforts to fight delegitimization, bringing MK Bassel Ghattas (Joint List) to interject: "It won't work."
"Israel will continue to be a light unto the nations," Shaked vowed.
Minister-Without-Portfolio Ofir Akunis posited: "Maybe, when radical Islam takes over Europe, people there will understand the real meaning of occupation."
After incessant interruptions from Joint List MKs, Akunis shouted to them: "Your narrative is a lie. It is violent and it encourages terrorism...Your narrative was based on terrorism even before the State of Israel was founded!"
Referring to the ambassadorial appointment Akunis is seeking, MK Ahmed Tibi (Joint List) shouted to Akunis to "go to the UN."
"OK, you go to Arafat's grave and I'll go to the UN. I"m not going to let someone who was an advisor to Arafat lecture me," Akunis said to Tibi, who used to work for the PLO chairman.
MK Nachman Shai (Labor) opened the discussion by saying that diplomatic pressure on apartheid South Africa began with its ejection from FIFA, and that is what the Palestinians were trying to do to Israel.
"We cannot let history repeat itself. If we do not act here and now, if we do not initiate diplomatic processes to break the blockade on us, we will be left alone," he warned.
Yesh Atid MK Aliza Lavie warned that the government does not have a "clear policy, no action, no strategy, no plan with a budget" to fight delegitimization.
"Israel is on the verge of the abyss, yet we're putting out fires instead of taking initiative," she lamented.
MK Michal Rosin repeated statements that BDS is "not against the occupation, they're anti-Semitic" in a mocking tone, adding "oy oy."
"The real issue is the policy of continuing the occupation and managing the conflict," she claimed.
MK Michael Oren (Kulanu), former Ambassador to the US, responded that "this isn't about settlements. BDS wants to erase Israel from the map."
Oren credited NGOs like StandWithUs, CAMERA and AIPAC for doing "holy work" to combat BDS, but criticized the government for "abandoning an important topic for our security."
"We have to take our security into our hands and launch a campaign against this strategic danger, which could become existential," he stated.
Oren called the cancellation of the vote to eject Israel from FIFA a victory, but warned "we cannot rest on our laurels. The danger hasn't passed; it's gotten worse."
Tibi, who took the stand next, asked Oren if he thinks it's alright that Israel doesn't let Palestinian athletes play and whether politics and sports should mix.
"Do you oppose BDS?" Oren retorted.
"Like a real Jew, he answers a question with a question," Tibi quipped.
MK Anat Berko (Likud), pointed out that there is precedent of athletes and other VIPs being allowed out of Gaza taking part in terrorist activities; therefore, athletes must go through checkpoints, as well.
When Berko called Palestinian Football Association President Jibril Rajoub "a terrorist from a family of terrorists," a Joint List MK asked "Who are you to decide?"
Berko is a world-renown expert on terrorism, who lectured on the topic at George Washington University and the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.
The Likud MK recounted that when she and Oren started a caucus to fight delegitimization, the only factions whose members would not join were Meretz and the Joint List.
"We will fight delegitimization from the inside and the outside," she said.
"What does that mean?" Rosin asked.
"That you wouldn't join the battle," Berko retorted. "You're delusional. You think no one tried to delegitimize Israel before 1967?"
Meretz chairwoman Zehava Gal-On took umbrage with some MKs' rhetoric, saying her party "opposes boycotts of Israel, we just can't stand how you act like victims!
"You act like whoever criticizes the occupation is an anti-Semite. Calm down. Netanyahu's policies are what encourages those who boycott us," she stated.
Zionist Union MK Eyal Ben-Reuven pointed out that it was Unity Day, in memory of the three teens murdered by Palestinians last year, and called for MKs to unite to fight delegitimization, saying "there is no coalition and opposition on this matter."
Ghattas, however, disagreed with the sentiment.
"Even some people on the Left need to wake up," he said. "The world is sanctioning Israel because of the occupation."
In his usual flippant fashion, MK Oren Hazan (Likud) said to Joint List MKs: "You're Arab citizens of Israel. If you don't like it here, leave...We're here to stay, I'm not so sure about you.
"People keep talking about the occupation; I don't know about any occupation," he added. "The Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel and not the Ishmaelites."
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| Ayelet Sheked |
by Ayelet Sheked in Jerusalem Post
Israel is under attack. Since last week, Hamas terrorists have fired more than 1000 rockets at our civilian centers, launching those rockets from residential enclaves, kindergartens and hospitals, exposing their own children to harm as they try to kill our children.
There's no ambiguity among our allies as to Israel’s right to defend her citizens. In fact, many Arab voices, in Egypt and elsewhere, have condemned Hamas, blaming it for the tragedy it is bringing on the heads of its own people.
Sadly, the militant, leftist propaganda machine has not changed its tune, looking for every opportunity to make Israel the culprit in a war she did not desire and which she entered reluctantly, after days of increasing provocation. I refer specifically to "Daily Beast" writer Gideon Resnick, who so misrepresented the facts in one of my recent Facebook posts, one has to wonder if his hatred for my country hasn't rendered him outright useless to his website and his readers.
In a story headlined "Israeli Politician Declares War on the Palestinian People," Resnick actually suggested I compared Palestinian children to “little snakes,” and accused me of fomenting Palestinian genocide. This vilification was later picked up by several bloggers and reporters, all of whom were convinced of this frightening notion, without even a scrap of fact or truth.
Let's start with my July 1 Facebook post. It was written some 12 years ago, but never published, by a dear man, the recently departed journalist Uri Elitzur. The gist of his article was that once one side in a war attacks the other side's civilians, they can no longer morally claim a special status for their own civilians.
Go ahead, ask a Hebrew speaking friend to translate it for you, they'll confirm this is what my Facebook post was about. But you'll find not a trace of that in Resnick's account. Perhaps it's his own ignorance of the Hebrew language. After all, he got the text from Electronic Intifada, a website dedicated to daily and hourly vilification of my country.
All Resnick had to do to make Elitzur's sober, legally minded discussion sound like a speech made by Hitler himself, was to cherry pick words out of context. A call for the indiscriminate killing of children is a terrible thing. But what if the statement was that any time you kill our children, you're exposing your own children to the same fate? Still unsettling, but rational when you consider that they purposely use their kids as human shields. It's not a call for indiscriminate murder.
And then Resnick turned to character assassination. He cited an attack on me by Haaretz. They said I was “representative of an ideology unembarrassed by its racism.”
Haaretz, unfortunately, may look like The New York Times, but it is far from being a liberal, curious newspaper in the Anglo Saxon tradition. Expecting Haaretz to write about a political opponent like myself in an honest, informative—if critical—manner, is a little like expecting Gideon Resnick to offer an unbiased, honest citation from a pro-Zionist post.
And so, when Haaretz, read by a mere 30,000 Israelis, give or take, says I'm racist – I'd look for a more reliable source.
Then, in a second article, Resnick also sneaks in the dumb female bit: "the 38-year-old Shaked is also frequently the target of subtle sexism, at best referred to as 'a young and pretty secular woman.'” And the citation is from – you guessed it, Haaretz. In fact, Electronic Intifada and Haaretzare Resnick's only sources, other than his brutalization of the Elitzur piece.
Resnick's distortions aside, the fact is that international pressure on Israel has not yielded peace because Israel is not starting the wars.
1. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are engaged in terrorism, one overtly, the other in a supportive role. Money is being transferred from the PA to the families of suicide bombers and convicted murderers in Israeli jails. The pay is actually based on the number and severity of the murders committed. The more gruesome the murder, the larger the number of Israeli victims, the higher the monthly reward.
Can anyone deny it?
2. Palestinian education today is based on violence and incitement against Israelis and Jews. Palestinian textbooks and Palestinian media ceaselessly promote Jew hatred. They praise Jew murderers. Their heroes and celebrities are Jew killers. They name streets and traffic circles after killers of Jewish children.
Can anyone deny it?
At the same time, the murder of Jerusalem teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir was immediately condemned by all of Israel's society.
As a Knesset Member, I can assure you his murderers, once convicted for their terrible crime, will remain in prison for the rest of their lives.
We will certainly not name streets after them.
3. In Israel we protect our citizens from incoming Hamas missiles.
Hamas, on the other hand, positions its missile launchers in the midst of civilian enclaves, using women and children as human shields against Israeli raids.
Just the other day, the world watched a Hamas spokesman admitting they instructed civilians not to leave their Gaza homes during air strikes, in order to protect those arsenals of weapons.
Each Palestinian rocket coming out of Gaza represents two separate war crimes: one for purposely targeting a civilian population in Israel, the other for launching from within their own civilian population.
Not many journalists bother to share this information with their readers. It confuses the narrative, messes with the David and Goliath scenario.
Our residents in southern Israel have endured these missiles for more than 14 years. Many children and teens have known only life in a war zone. This past week, all our urban centers were targeted. How would you expect our government to react? How would you want your own government to deal with a similar onslaught on your neighborhood? What do you want us to do? Lie down and die?
The late Uri Elitzur wrote so eloquently in the article I cited on Facebook:
“The laws of war acknowledge that it is impossible to avoid hitting enemy civilians. Those laws did not condemn the British air force for firebombing and completely destroying the German city of Dresden, or US planes for wrecking the cities of Poland and half of Hungary's Budapest, whose residents had never done anything against America. Those sites had to be destroyed in order to win the war against evil.”
Israel's fight against Hamas terrorism is similar to NATO's war on Al-Qaeda terrorism. Moreover, Israel is the only state who is notifying civilians to leave their homes before an attack by texting them.
Israel has no agenda against Arab civilians in Gaza, just as the US has none against Arabs in any of the countries where it's conducting its now 13-year war to preserve civilization from violent barbarism.
We want a good life, with peace and prosperity for all the eight million plus people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Indeed, if the Arab society enjoys prosperity, so will Jewish society, and vice versa. let me be very clear I condemn any kind of assault against innocent civilians, whether they are Jews or Arabs.
But in order to get there, they must stop firing rockets at us.
The madness of Hamas continued yesterday, after Israel embraced an Egyptian call for a ceasefire. Hamas rejected the offer, and as of now has been shooting at all over Israel with renewed vigor.
Israelis are so used to the scene where we offer our hand in peace and the other side reacts by trying to cut it off, that we're not even surprised. What does surprise us, time and again, are the voices in the West, like Resnick's, which pin the blame for this madness on us. As in that famous quip: "It all started when Israel retaliated."
As an aside, I’ll point out that a week later The Daily Beast finally removed one blatant lie from Resnick’s original article, where he accused me of being the author of statements I never made.
But this correction is too little, too late, the damage has already been done. And so, you must ask yourselves, do you really want to continue getting your news reports about my country from writers who view the truth as little more than a needless inconvenience?
The author is a Member of Knesset for the Bayit Yehudi.
Finally, someone with common sense, tells the Mushagna Kerry, where to get off.
US Secretary of State John Kerry is putting lives at risk by gambling on the peace process, Bayit Yehudi faction chairwoman Ayelet Shaked wrote in a letter to him Thursday.
Shaked began the letter explaining that, due to the gravity of the situation, she feels that she “simply cannot be bound by the restraints of politically correct wording” and must be straightforward.
“By forcing Israel to capitulate to terrorism by releasing murdering terrorists with so much blood on their hands that the US would never dream of releasing if it was their own citizens murdered –
you are not only being extremely hypocritical, but are actually dabbling in experimentation and gambling, by putting me and my children’s lives at risk,”
Shaked wrote in the letter, which was also sent to US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro and Israel’s Ambassador to the US Michael Oren.
According to Shaked, US pressure to release terrorists from prison, as it did earlier this week,
“is made all the more absurd, cynical and vicious by the fact that [the US] refuses to this day to release [Israeli agent] Jonathan Pollard from jail, despite the unprecedented [prison sentence] he has served thusfar.”
The Bayit Yehudi MK added that Israelis will pay the price of releasing convicted murderers, not Kerry.
“How will you carry the burden of the terrible price toward which you are leading us?” she wrote.
“You forced us into peace talks during a period of time that the entire Middle East is in chaos, without realizing that by doing so, you have foolishly put us in an impossible situation in which we cannot and will not make any concessions.”
Shaked wrote that Kerry raised expectations to a dangerous level that could lead the entire region to once again spin out of control once they’re proven to be unrealistic.
In conclusion, Shaked pointed out that “the past four years in Israel have been quiet and peaceful as ever.”
She suggested that Kerry “perform [his] job in a much more effective and relevant fashion by focusing [his] attention on Syria and Egypt, where people are actually being slaughtered.”
