Who Cares What They Think?

UPDATE 5:30 pm Israel time Friday:

In the last hour, the Israeli government has been attempting to carry out the evacuation of the Oz Zion outpost near Beit El in Samaria. One Jewish community member has been arrested.

The Oz Zion outpost near the Beit El community in Samaria. Evacuated and destroyed today--rebuilt tomorrow.

With each such evacuation, Benjamin Netanyahu loses votes in the coming election.

TODAY’S BLOG:

Even by world standards, December has seen an avalanche of criticism directed toward Israel. It seems that everyone in the world thinks that he or she has a right to criticize every aspect of life in the country. Criticism of Israel is simply one of the world’s most flourishing cottage industries.

Of course all of us in Israel know that when the Norwegian and French foreign ministers criticize Israel for withholding tax monies (to partially pay the Palestinians’ long delinquent electricity bill), they are only making such criticism to score points with their Norwegian and French domestic Muslim constituents.

When you hear the French foreign minister criticizing Israel for the millionth time--this is what he is looking at in downtown Paris on a Friday afternoon (photo weaselzippers).

And when Ban Ki-Moon and the Security Council castigate Israel for planning to build Jewish homes in Jerusalem, we all know that it is yet another completely meaningless anti-Israel exercise performed by completely meaningless self-proclaimed “diplomats”. 

And when Reform rabbis in the U.S. criticize Israel for not allowing women to pray with men at the Western Wall, and Turkish PM Erdogan condemns Israel for besieging Gaza, and when the Pakistani president, and the Egyptian foreign minister, and the Brazilian Ambassador, and former President Jimmy Carter, and, and, and . . . a thousand others . . .  don’t they all realize that all of that criticism just becomes background noise?

And that nobody in Israel really cares what any of them thinks?

One of the departments at Israel's newest university: the Ariel University Center of Samaria.

Your humble servant thought about all this yesterday when Alistair Burt, Britain’s minister for the Middle East (can you even believe that Britain has a minister for the Middle East?) condemned the decision to make the Ariel University Center of Samaria a full-fledged Israeli university: “This decision will deepen the presence of the settlements in the Palestinian territories and will create another obstacle to peace.”

Pardon your humble servant while he yawns.

Burt went on to praise Mahmoud Abbas for his “tempered response” to Israeli aggression in building Jewish homes in Jerusalem.

Pardon your humble servant while he laughs.

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