Dani Dayan and the challenge to Israeli democracy - by Caroline Glick

...Dani Dayan’s appointment is a test case. Shaked’s bill is also a test case. If the government stands its ground on Dayan’s stationing to Brasilia, and if the Knesset passes Shaked’s bill as written or a stronger version of it, then Israel will have taken its first steps towards ensuring that it will not be undermined by fringe elements of its society funded by hostile foreign governments. If the government fails in either of these undertakings, then it can expect acts of diplomatic, political and legal subversion to proliferate and will see its ability to advance the policies it was elected to implement disappear.

Caroline Glick..
Our World/JPost..
28 December '15..

Today Israel's bilateral relations with Brazil are moving toward a full-blown crisis. If the government doesn’t address the causes of the crisis, going forward it will find itself unable to competently advance Israel’s interests in the international community.

Brazil has the ninth largest economy in the world and is a rapidly growing market for Israeli exports.

Israel’s bilateral trade with Brazil expanded nearly 60 percent between 2009 and 2013. Israeli exports comprise two-thirds of the overall trade.

Economics isn’t the only reason that Brazil and Israel have important joint interests. According to Alberto Nisman, the slain Argentinean prosecutor who investigated the Iranian bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, Brazil serves as a major hub for Iranian and Hezbollah activities in Latin America.

Given Brazil’s importance as a market and as a defense partner, Israel needs a serious ambassador posted to Brasilia capable of advancing relations. In Dani Dayan, Israel has such a representative.

Dayan is a native of Argentina. He knows Latin America better than career diplomats.

Dayan was an early hi-tech entrepreneur. He led his company, Elad Systems for 23 years, building it from a small information technology firm into a 500-employee company with an annual revenue stream of NIS100 million. Given his business background, Dayan’s ability to promote Israeli-Brazilian trade is self-evident.

Dayan is a political pragmatist. When he served as the leader of the Council of Jewish Communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, he made it his goal to demonstrate to the wider public that the communities are an integral part of Israel. As the council’s representative to the international community, Dayan worked tirelessly to combat the delegitimization of Israel as a whole and of the Israeli communities in the areas. In a sphere where Israel has precious little to show for its efforts, Dayan’s public diplomacy efforts stood out.

In light of this, when Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu appointed Dayan to serve as Israel’s ambassador to Brazil in August, the appointment was not seen as controversial. Rather it was widely viewed as a sign that Netanyahu is keen to expand Israel’s bilateral ties with Brazil and more generally, that Israel is interested in seriously advancing its ties to Latin America.

This apparently was bad news for the EU- and US-financed radical Left. For many years radical leftists have made no effort to hide their interest in maintaining and expanding Israel’s international and economic weakness. As they see it, the stronger Israel is, the less vulnerable it will be to foreign pressure to make further concessions to the PLO.

And so, after the government approved Dayan’s appointment, fringe leftists associated with EU- and US-funded political NGOs set out to scuttle the appointment.

The PA's "Diplomatic Intifada" Against Israel

...With such an intifada raging against Israel, it is hard to see how the peace talks could ever result in an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. Abbas obviously does not believe that the talks will produce an agreement. That is why his strategy these days is, with the help of the international community, to try to impose a solution on Israel.

Khaled Abu Toameh..
Gatestone Institute..
29 October '13..

As the US-sponsored peace talks continue, the Palestinian Authority has launched a worldwide campaign to promote sanctions against settlements in the West Bank and Jewish neighborhoods of east Jerusalem.

The latest campaign is mainly aimed at persuading the European Union [EU] to activate its new "guidelines" that call for imposing sanctions on any Israeli institution or organization that operates over the pre-1967 lines, namely east Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights. The EU regulations are expected to go into effect on the first of January, 2014.

But the Palestinian Authority fears that the EU, under pressure from the Americans, may delay imposing the restrictions out of fear that the move could harm the peace talks. That is why Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas last week visited a number of EU countries in a bid to convince their leaders not to delay implementation of their anti-settlement "guidelines."

During a press conference in Brussels with the President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, Abbas called on international firms that do business with settlements to stop "violating international law."

Abbas's EU tour coincided with reports that the Palestinian Authority leadership has prepared a "blacklist" of 500 international companies that have business ties with settlements. The Palestinian Authority is threatening to take legal action against these companies.

So while the Palestinian Authority is conducting peace talks with Israel, its leaders are busy waging a fierce campaign in the international arena against settlements .

Yet what Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is not telling the European leaders is that he himself agreed three months ago to drop his demand for a full cessation of settlement construction as a precondition for returning to the negotiating table. For four years, Abbas refused to resume peace talks with Israel unless the Israeli government agreed to a full cessation of settlement construction. He eventually abandoned this demand after coming under heavy pressure from U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.