As we say at Yom Kippur, the doors are closing. In England, that is. A few days ago a talk by Benny Morris to the Israel Society at Cambridge University was canceled under pressure from students who cited Morris’s anti-Arab statements in One State, Two States.
And tonight, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon was heckled and denounced in an appearance at Oxford University. Writes someone who was there:
Inside, numerous individual students interrupted the talk, challenging Ayalon’s assertions that the West Bank and East Jerusalem were not Occupied Territory, and that Israel had ‘given up’ a third of its country in its peace deal with Egypt.
Before long Ayalon was not able to continue his rehearsed speech, and was forced to contend with a gathering storm of intelligent questions and statements contradicting his evasions and outright lies. At one point a member of the Palestine Society read out a full page of the Goldstone Report dealing with Israel’s deliberate killing of civilians, to thunderousapplause from the audience. Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Ron Prosor, sitting in the front row, looked bewildered and embarrassed by his colleague’s unstatesemanlike performance.
