ISRAELI EXCEPTIONALISM

JONATHAN OFIR—So his person —Bennett—is a kind of modern combination of religious fundamentalism and ultra-nationalism, mixed with a kind of secular, ‘Western’, ‘startup’ nature that Israelis like to identify with. Bennett lives in Ra’anana, a city north of Tel-Aviv, so he does not live in one of the West Bank settlements as one might expect (unlike Avigdor Liberman, the new Finance Minister, who is avowedly secular and hateful of ultra-orthodox religious Jews). Nonetheless, as leader of a religious-settler movement, Bennett is an ideological settler-leader. He leads the war criminals and cheers the war crimes, from Ra’anana, and now from the highest post in Israel.

YASHA LEVINE—Born in Moscow in 1960, Avigdor Eskin escaped to Israel as a teenager and drifted toward Arab-bashing extremists like Meir Kahane. After a string of brushes with the law as a young man, Eskin emerged as a prominent far-right wacko in his own right. In 1995, enraged by Yitzkak Rabin’s signing of the Oslo Accords with Yassir Arafat, Eskin made a public show of laying a kabalistic curse on the Prime Minister. He led a ceremony in front of the prime minister’s house, and intoned a curse: “Angels of destruction will hit him. He is damned wherever he goes. His soul will instantly leave his body … A disaster he has never experienced will beget him and all curses known in the Torah will apply to him. I deliver to you, the angels of wrath and ire, Yitzhak, the son of Rosa Rabin, that you may smother him. Put to death the cursed Yitzhak. May he be damned, damned, damned!”

Before hard evidence emerged of Israeli efforts to “destroy” him, Duncan had already been targeted by the CFI to stop him being promoted within the British government.

On July 16, 2016, Duncan wrote: “All seems clear and agreed that I will be Minister for the Middle East, as expected. Permanent Under-Secretary Simon McDonald called to say it’s all been agreed and he would recommend it to the Foreign Secretary.”

He continued: “But when I see Boris [Johnson] at 6pm it seems a massive problem has arisen, which is nothing short of contemptible. Boris says the Conservative Friends of Israel are going ballistic.”

Johnson reported that Eric Pickles and Stuart Polak, both senior figures in the CFI, “have both called him incessantly saying I must not be appointed.”

Duncan wrote that the opposition from the CFI is “for no other reason than that I believe in the rights of the Palestinians.”

“Whereas they pretend to believe in two parallel states, it’s quite clear that they don’t, and so set out to destroy all genuine advocates for Palestine,” he added.

He concluded: “They just want to belittle and subjugate the Palestinians.”

One US military leader has called Israel “the intelligence equivalent of five CIAs.” An Israeli cabinet minister likens his country to “the equivalent of a dozen US aircraft carriers,” while the Jerusalem Post defines Israel as the executive of a “superior Western military force that” protects “America’s interests in the region.” Arab leaders have called Israel “a club the United States uses against the Arabs,” and “a poisoned dagger implanted in the heart of the Arab nation.”

DUBAI: This week, The New York Times ran a full page ad that condemned part-Palestinian models Gigi and Bella Hadid and British-Albanian popstar Dua Lipa for showing solidarity with the people of Palestine. “Bella, Gigi and Dua, Hamas calls for a second holocaust. Condemn them now (sic),” read the headline of the advertisement, which took the form of a letter to the three prominent stars. The advert was organized, produced and paid for by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, the head of the World Values Network.

The ad, which ran on Saturday in the main section of the newspaper, named Lipa and the Hadid sisters as “mega-influencers” who have “accused Israel of ethnic cleansing” and “vilified the Jewish State.”