Unjustified Isolation of Israel Increasing

Make no mistake: Today we are witnessing the increasing international isolation of Israel. Natan Sharansky, chairman of the executive of the Jewish Agency for
Israel, stressed to me that the aggressiveness of anti-Israeli — and mostly at the same time anti-Semitic — cheap propaganda had never been so intense in all the past decades.

Undoubtedly, much of this was triggered by the Goldstone Report on the Gaza War. The report leveled false accusations against Israel, with a total lack of respective evidence, while the innocence of Hamas terrorists was taken for granted, even in view of conclusive evidence of their guilt.

The more than 8,000 missile attacks that terrorized thousands of Israelis are trivialized as a pretext for the true purpose of the Gaza operation. Clear facts prove that Israel in no way aimed at the death of innocent civilians but on the contrary, made every effort to minimize the number of civilian victims.

Hamas, by contrast, deliberately pursued the policy to fire its missiles out of densely populated areas, to deploy its combatants in civilian clothing and to misuse civilians as human shields. In addition, an immense quantity of weapons was stored in mosques.

None of these actions, however, triggered a U.N. intervention, the so-called Human Rights Commission, which dedicated half of its assemblies of the past years to Israel in an unbalanced and frighteningly one-sided manner.

Professor Alan Dershowitz stresses in his analysis, “The Case Against the Goldstone Report,” that the central mistake of the report’s absurd conclusions is the extensive ignorance of those who deliberately committed war crimes, and this beyond any doubt was Hamas.

“The distorted and biased Goldstone assertions ignore the Israeli army’s extraordinary responsibility, which operated under impossible conditions in a moral manner during the Gaza War,” Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak explained.

Israel’s allies have always insisted on supporting Israel’s right of self-defense against any kind of attacks. But how many of them lifted a finger to protest against the missile attacks from Gaza against
Sderot and other Israeli towns, while the explicit denunciation of Israel’s “disproportionate” deployment in retaliatory actions occurred most exceedingly.

Given that, it is little helpful when Goldstone himself said: “If we had presented our giving of evidence to a court, our findings would not have been admitted.” Goldstone’s report for the United Nations is a discriminatory and absolutely unjust condemnation.

Further isolation came following the diplomatic row between Israel and the United States. The moment chosen for the announcement of a housing project in Jerusalem during the visit of Vice President Joseph Biden was indubitably a brainless fatuity of some staff of the Interior Ministry.

I, however, wonder why in the first place declarations on building projects — which moreover are to be realized in some years — do have to be made officially. It is a fact that the announced project does not represent any breach of an agreement between President Obama and Netanyahu. Indeed the U.S. administration previously lauded Israel publicly for the freeze of settlement activities during 10 months as a major concession. Israel had excluded Jerusalem from this freeze explicitly and in Obama’s full knowledge of this fact.

Obama has been in office for more than a year now. However, he has not yet deemed it to be necessary to visit Israel, though he already has gone to Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.

Time and again he has claimed biased concessions from Israel, but not one single time asked for an advance to be made by the Palestinians. In an analysis, The Jerusalem Post states that Obama has not once publicly reprimanded the Palestinian Authority.

It must be considered as ruthless that neither the White House nor the U.S. State Department has ever expressed a word of protest against the continued incitement against Israel in the official PLO media. This topic includes, as well, the fact that Biden’s visit with “peace partner” Mahmoud Abbas happened almost concurrently with the morbid ceremony (celebrated as a day of honor and pride by Palestinian TV), in which a public square in Ramallah was named in honor of Dalal Mughrabi, a terrorist responsible for a 1978 massacre in which 38 Israelis, among them 13 children, were murdered.

Under such circumstances, it is easy to understand why Abbas declared with true satisfaction in the Washington Post to be confident that the U.S. administration would ensure that the Palestinians would get every right called for, which is why he sees no advantage in negotiating directly with the Israelis in the first place.

Ephraim Halevy, former head of Mossad, attributes Obama’s biased Middle East policies to his decision to brush up Islam’s worldwide tarnished image at the expense of Israel. The unprecedented attacks of the Obama administration against Israel’s sovereignty are — and this merits enhancement — not shared widely by the American people and Congress, because there is an understanding for certain limits Netanyahu in no case may exceed.

“The problem in no way consists of the Israeli concessions for construction in Jerusalem,” Michael B. Oren, Israeli ambassador to the United States, stressed in The New York Times. “The problem is the Palestinians continuously increasing demands.”

The most regrettable aspect of the outcome of Biden’s trip to Israel is that in the turbulence caused by the announcement of settlement activities in Jerusalem, the most crucial issue was not dealt with, namely to summon the powers of the region for the showdown with Iran, the most dangerous threat in the Mideast. Saying this, we must not forget that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Jordan’s King
Abdullah and Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia, all assume that Iran is an equally deadly menace to their regimes as to Israel.

“The Israeli settlements are not at all the problem,” stressed Bret Stephens, a Wall Street Journal editor. “The most relevant problem is that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is an existential conflict and not a territorial one.”

The majority of Israelis are prepared to live with a Palestinian state along the country’s borders. The Palestinians, however, are in no way willing to live with a Jewish state along theirs.”

Given that simple fact, why isolate Israel?

Arthur Cohn is an international film producer whose films include “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” “Central Station” and “One Day in September.”