The tidbit below was written by Elior Levy and published by Y-Net.
The Palestinians have launched a diplomatic campaign calling on countries to prohibit private companies operating within their borders from conducting business in the West Bank settlements and east Jerusalem.The only reason that BDS has any traction at all is because we acquiesced to the notion that Jews should not build housing for themselves in Judaea and Samaria. It is because prominent Jewish liberals agreed with Mahmoud Abbas that Jews should be allowed to live in certain places but not others within our ancestral homeland that opened the door for president Barack Obama to likewise condemn "settlement activity" which gave the EU notice that the US backs the anti-Semitic boycott movement.
Mohammad Shtayyeh, a senior economic official and negotiator in the peace talks with Israel, told the Financial Times on Thursday that the Palestinian Authority’s minister of foreign affairs had begun sending letters about a month ago to 50 countries that are home to 504 companies with business in settlements, asking them to withdraw their investment or freeze their activities.
Commercial activity in the settlements is illegal and constitutes a violation of international law, the letters said.
If we had stood up from the beginning and told people like Abbas and Obama that Jews have every right to live in, and build housing for themselves, and conduct business in, the land that Jews have been living on for over 3,500 years it would have been much harder for Obama to support Abbas in his BDS activities. He would have needed to do so directly over the objections of his Jewish supporters. Instead he does so with the approval of progressive-left American Jews who seem to think that the real enemy is not so much Hamas or al-Qaeda or the Brotherhood or Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad, but Yosef and Melody Hartuv who actually have the chutzpah to live in the ancestral Jewish city of Hevron.
What it is is a hangover from Oslo. The Oslo "peace process" is long dead, but no one seems to have told people like Alan Dershowitz and the progressive Jewish left seems not to have the creative imagination to think in fresh terms.
And now, according to Y-Net, we have PA officials claiming that "commercial activity in the settlements is illegal." Please try to wrap your brain around that moronic statement. Commercial activity in the settlements is illegal and constitutes a violation of international law. The ironic thing, of course, as the article goes on to mention, is that if the PA is successful in its racist campaign against the Jews 20,000 to 30,000 Palestinian-Arabs will be thrown out of work.
I say that it is time to boycott the Palestinian Authority. Mahmoud Abbas is in the 9th year of a 4 year term and is, thus, the democratically elected leader of nothing and should be treated as such.
This hideous charade needs to end and Israel needs to take matters into its own hands.
Declare final borders.
Remove IDF to behind final borders.
Toss keys over shoulder.
From the comments:
11. ConfusedI couldn't agree more, Ellen.
How can anyone in Israel or beyond listen to this man and claim that Israel has a valid "peace partner" When will the Israeli left and their friends wake up and face reality. The PA and its government are a joke. Israel brought them out of obscurity and it is time to return them to obscurity.
Ellen , Israel/NYC (10.25.13)
15. Total Israeli boycott of Fictional Palestine.Chaim is a tad more hyperbolic than am I, but he is also correct.
There is no excuse left for conducting negotiations with the terrorist P.A. These creaps are no different than Nazis standing in front of Jewish stores to foster racist boycotts. The time is long overdue for Israel to end all talks with these vile racists. End ALL Israeli support for Fictional Palestine. No more food, money, materials, medicine, electricity. NOTHING for evil Fictional Palestine.
Chaim , Israel (10.25.13)
Why is Israel supporting an organization that is devoted to the demise of Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land?