Bibi's boycott: Will 2014 be the year that Israel divorces the world?

[Israeli]

Make no mistake. Whatever gains BDS scores this coming year, this will be Bibi's boycott, the only real achievement he can point to. This will be Israel's doing.

By Bradley Burston | Dec. 17, 2013

One week. Just one cold, dark, miserable week in December, but more than long enough to understand the reason why boycotts against Israel may be gaining momentum.
The reason is that if Israel's government were actively striving to encourage the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, fuel it, expand its impact, accelerate its growth, it could not do a better job than the one it is doing right now.

Maybe 2014 will be the year that Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel makes itself so unlikable, so unsympathetic, so intentionally anti-democratic – champion only of settlers, tycoons, and the Orthodox and Born Again Christian hard right - that boycotts will simply come naturally.
Maybe this will be the year that Israel divorces the world. Divorces even the majority of Jews in it – non-Orthodox, anti-settlement, pro-tolerance and human rights.

(snip sadly .. cos you guys really should read it all )

At this point, the boycott movement is nearly the only concrete achievement the Netanyahu government can point to. It seems determined to miss no opportunity to kick the world in the teeth, even as it relates to thousands of its most disadvantaged residents by kicking them when they are down.
Netanyahu may extol the rights of gays and the wonders of Israeli democracy. But the prime minister knows the truth as well as anyone.
If he can continue to win by picturing Israel as nothing more than the innocent victim of irrational hate, the only loser will be Israel, and all who live here.

http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/.premium-1.564066

[Jefferson23]

1. Not according to the pro-Israeli government DU members here:

Netanyahu may extol the rights of gays and the wonders of Israeli democracy. ( ad nauseam )

But the prime minister knows the truth as well as anyone.

If he can continue to win by picturing Israel as nothing more than the innocent victim of irrational hate, the only loser will be Israel, and all who live here.

[sabbat hunter]

2. cannot read full article

hidden behind pay wall.

[azurnoir]

3. more:

How else to explain all this? How else to explain a week in which Benjamin Netanyahu's explanation for why he snubbed memorial ceremonies for Nelson Mandela (the trip would cost too much) was worse than the snub itself. Especially when it freed Netanyahu and his cabinet to do the following:

1) Worsen ties with the EU, and enrage visiting Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and his government, by refusing to allow a cargo security scanner donated by the Netherlands to be used for one of its main goals: facilitating export of goods from Gaza to the West Bank in order to help alleviate poverty in the Strip.

2) Kill proposed gay rights legislation that would have banned discrimination based on sexual orientation. A poll later showed that 70 percent of Israelis support equal rights for gays.
.................................................................................................................

5) Quietly revive and advance a supposedly defunct plan that would have entailed expulsion of some 30,000 Bedouin citizens of Israel from their current homes in the Negev. One of the stewards of the bill will be Likud MK Miri Regev, who last year called Sudanese refugees "a cancer" in Israeli society, only to later apologize – to cancer sufferers – for the analogy.

http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/.premium-1.5640


the first part of item #5 means the Prawer-Begin Plan -an announcement by a governmental minister that the plan had been scrapped was trumpeted in headlines worldwide, the follow up that nothing had transpired beyond that lone announcement and no orders to cease implementation had been issued to any governmental agency and there for the plan was still intact-not so much