The BDS Movement of Israel's 'Allies'

"[The situation in the West Bank is] rapidly deteriorating amid unprecedented levels of settler violence and settlement expansion, including the unacceptable decision to publish tenders for theE1 settlement project."

"[The Israeli government must] immediately halt the expansion of settlements and civilian administrative powers, ensure accountability for settler violence and investigate allegations against Israeli forces."

Joint statement: Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden United Kingdom  

An Israeli settler works at a winery at the settlement of Yitzhar, south of the Palestinian city of Nablus. The U.K. government plans to implement a comprehensive trade ban and targeted sanctions on goods and services from Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria. (Getty Images)

 

"Today, France and Canada are announcing alongside Britain that they will also ban the import of goods from illegal settlements."

"The Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Spain and Norway, which have either banned goods or are in the process of doing so, with many other countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Poland, Portugal and Sweden, [are] pledging today they will support further action."

"[The U.K. will also take action] against specific companies and individuals who provide services such as construction, infrastructure, financing or real estate for settlement expansion."

"The British government agrees that there is ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists."

U.K. Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband 

Israel is a liberal democracy with a fully independent judiciary. It has internal problems, just as every other state has. It also has external-derived problems that no other state must cope with. Within Israel's population there is a multitude of ethnic and cultural and religious groups, from Christians to Druze and Kurds, Circassians, Bedouin, Baha'i and Muslims with full citizenship. The Israeli-Palestinian segment of the population alone represents 18 percent of the population, with full citizen rights. Not a single Jew is permitted to live in the Palestinian Territories.

 

In a world other than the Middle East, the prospect of a Jewish state living alongside that of a Muslim state has been a problem for a century and more. With the decision of 1947 by the UN that Arabs calling themselves Palestinians and Jews could live side-by-side in sovereign states of their own, Israel declared  

itself reborn in 1948 in an excess of joy, while Palestinians rejected the offer that partitioned the allotted territory for a state of its own. It has never, in the 80 years since then, moved to become a state through an agreement by which it would recognize the legitimacy of the Jewish state.

 

Simply put, it awaited an opportunity that would see the destruction of Israel, with the Judean ancestral land declared theirs and theirs alone. An expectation and reality that is held by Palestinians but which remains unrevealed to the Western democracies that remain convinced that a two-state 'solution' will bring peace and security to both purported states. This, while Palestinian leaders have never stopped inciting their people toward terrorism which they call martyrdom. And to ensure that those martyrs are rewarded on earth, not only in Paradise attended by 72 virgins, payment goes out from the Palestinian Authority to those who commit violence against Jews.

 

Palestinian children are taught from elementary school forward to value martyrdom and to conceive of themselves as avengers against Jewish 'occupation' of Palestinian land. This grooming had the assistance of UNRWA, the UN agency devoted to the welfare of Palestinian victimhood, and respected by the very same countries that now insist Israel must put an end to reclaiming their historical geography squatted on by colonialists from Egypt and Jordan. None of these European nations condemning Israel for territorial 'expansionism' claiming a plot to disentitle and cleanse Palestinian from their proposed state have ever had to face the violent hatred that Israel does that results in horrific atrocities against its population.

 

When orthodox Jews 'settle' on their ancestral heritage in Judea and Samaria which the West has titled the West Bank, the Western community is outraged. When youth among those 'settlers' behave like the Palestinians constantly attacking Jews, Israel is outraged. Never so much however, as the international community which lingers solely on Jewish violence committed by a relative handful of Jewish hooligans and never on the institutionalized Palestinian mass-indoctrinated jihadists who are the pride of their leadership forever inculcating the lust of sadistic savagery on their youth.

 

Foreign interference in the affairs of another country is unsupportable by international standards of nation-to-nation diplomatic decorum. When it comes to Israel, all hindrances to bullying are withdrawn. The states that would bridle with indignation should any other country attempt to inform them what they should and must do internally to handle difficult situations, feel it is perfectly legitimate to consign the Jewish state to an entirely different level of expectations.  

 

A drone view shows a factory belonging to Israeli company Libi Construction and Infrastructure in Shilo, an Israeli area in Judea and Samaria. (Ammar Awad/Reuters)

 

 By coincidence most of these countries have themselves been colonized by a gradual influx of immigrants, refugees and economic migrants from Muslim countries. The Koran states quite clearly that it is the  religious obligation of the ummah -- all those faithful to Islam worldwideeee, to convert non-believers, to broaden the base of Islamic followers, to do their utmost to ensure that Islam eventually overtakes all other religious devotion on Earth, in a grand conquest that will see it sweep to the position it was meant by Islam's prophet to attain to.

 

One by one, the countries that have aligned themselves with the forces devoted to degrading Israel's security will find themselves in the final death throes of their culture, laws, values and heritage. Their confusion over the changes already taking place, challenging their way of life, beliefs and customs turns them instead to blaming the very nation that despite its faith in democracy will not allow itself to be destroyed by the overwhelming forces of political Islam. That face of Islam that other Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and North Africa are now protecting themselves from, even as the West falls. 

 

These are also the countries, ironically and incidentally, that stood by and watched without intervention when Europe under Nazi occupation methodically and institutionally scheduled a Final Solution to dispose of the unwanted presence of Jews among them who had lived among them for centuries as undervalued citizens who contributed far more than their share to the prosperity and and cultural identity of any country they lived in, throughout the diaspora.  

 

The British consulate in East Jerusalem. Israel has ordered the closure of the consulate after London led Western sanctions over violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians in Judea and Samaria. (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images)