Israel joins the OECD as anti-Zionist protests are ignored

Robin Shepherd
Robinshepherdonline.com
10 May '10

The breaking news today is that Israel has finally been invited to join the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Israel was brought into the OECD (and will formally join at a ceremony in Paris on May 27) along with Estonia and Slovenia. The number of OECD countries will thus rise to 34.

Predictably, activists sought to prevent the Jewish state (and only the Jewish state) from joining. According to Reuters, “Some critics and human rights activists — including Nobel peace laureate Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland, Italian vice-President of the European Parliament Luisa Morgantini, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe and filmmaker Ken Loach — made a last-minute bid urging OECD member states to delay the process.”

Interestingly enough, the most senior Palestinians did not mount significant, vocal objections*, offering another illustration that in some respects the group hysteria that defines the anti-Israeli agenda in much of Europe takes its participants in a more anti-Israeli direction than the Palestinians themselves.

This is a major achievement for Israel and it is indicative of the enormous contribution in technological innovation and other areas that Israel is making to the global economy. It also suggests that by simply knuckling down and behaving like the normal market democracy that Israel is, the Jewish state can integrate with the wider world in spite of the bigotry that is so frequently visited against it.

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