Thankless in Turtle Bay

Elliot Jager
Jewish Ideas Daily
18 February '11

After more than six months of internal squabbling, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud) and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman (Israel Beitenu) have, at last, agreed to dispatch the seasoned diplomat Ron Prosor as Israel's ambassador to the United Nations.

But what, realistically, can any Israeli ambassador hope to achieve at the UN? This is a body in which over 118 members identify themselves with the farcically labeled "non-aligned" bloc: an interlocking directorate that includes 57 countries belonging to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, 22 members of the Arab League, and five countries (Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and North Korea) that have no diplomatic relations with Israel. As if this weren't bad enough, the European Union nowadays rarely takes any initiative to support Israel's right to self-defense, and even Washington has been known to express its pique by occasionally throwing Jerusalem to the jackals.

Israel's first UN ambassador, Abba Eban (1949-1959), who served concurrently as ambassador to Washington, essentially disregarded his immediate audience to address his "language and emotion to the wider world beyond." His successor Michael Comay became one of Israel's leading representatives to American Jewry. In the lead-up to the Six-Day war, Gideon Rafael transmitted diplomatic messages from American decision-makers that the Israeli cabinet interpreted as providing a green light for a preemptive attack.

Not much, however, could be done inside the UN itself. In rebutting Yasir Arafat's gun-toting November 1974 speech to the General Assembly, Yosef Tekoa mainly directed himself to Israel's friends outside. Similarly, Chaim Herzog, in literally tearing apart the November 1975 resolution odiously designating Zionism as "a form of racism," was likewise speaking to the civilized world beyond.

(Read full "Thankless in Turtle Bay")

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.

Ian Katz Cries and Lies

Zach
Huffington Post Monitor
11 February '11

We didn't comment on it at the time, but recently Israeli ambassador to the UK Ron Prosor published a scathing critique of the Guardian's coverage of the Palestine Papers. If you haven't read it already you should do so right away and then come back here, because the Guardian has fired back in the form of an editorial by Ian Katz, Deputy Editor. The main thing we learn from the article is that though the Guardian is quite happy to attack anything they can get their hands on (and fact check later) they cannot handle being the target of criticism themselves. I'm not going to go through the whole post by I did want to hit some highlights.

Mr. Katz's tactics on this post are somewhat short of fisking. Instead it is more in the style of "Can you believe he said that?!" repeated over and over, with the assumption that the audience would simply accept Mr. Katz's view as true and Mr. Prosor's view as false. But with the Huffington Post, that's not a bad assumption. Where this was less pronounced is in Mr. Prosor's attacks on the Guardian itself, but we will get to that in a minute.

First we'll talk about the Palestine Papers, where Mr. Katz continues to cling to the myths that his paper peddled:

(Read full "Ian Katz Cries and Lies")

If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.
.