I know some people in my camp hate Israel. I don’t. I haven’t spent enough time there to be sure, and I love a couple people who live there (L’Israel lobby, c’est moi!). But a lot of people sure don’t like Israel these days, for very good reasons beginning with white phosphorus dropped on children. Sever Plocker writes at Ynet that he is thinking of turning down a chance to speak at Oxford because he fears the hectoring/rage that any Israeli gets in Europe these days. Notice the culprit Plocker finds: the Netanyahu gov’t. A sign that more and more pressure will come to bear on the Netanyahyu. Obama will be the last to join in, of course. But the collapse will come. Plocker:
An Israeli professor who quietly left a prestigious British university told me: “My academic and social life there was intolerable. Colleagues stayed away from me as if I was a leper. I was not invited to meetings, which were shifted from university buildings to private residences in order to keep me out. The fact I openly expressed leftist views was to no avail. My objection to the occupation and endorsement of a return to the 1967 borders made no difference. In practice, I became ostracized.”
“Today you are a welcome guest in the British and European academic world only if you reject the very existence of the colonialist and imperialistic creature that methodically commits war crimes, known as Israel,” he said. “Today it isn’t enough to condemn Bibi and Barak; in order to be accepted by academia outside of Israel one must condemn the Balfour Declaration.”
British academia’s radicalism highlights the accelerated deterioration in Israel’s status and image. We are in the midst of a freefall on the foreign affairs front..
Does everyone hate us? Possibly so, yet the fact is that up until six months ago Israel enjoyed an extraordinary boom on the foreign affairs front, both in terms of its foreign ties as well as in global public opinion. This fact points to one source for the deterioration we’re seeing: The new government in Jerusalem.
hat/tip Ilene Cohen
