Justice minister vows to fight ‘anti-Semitic’ boycott, with boycott
Day after British students vote to support BDS, Shaked says she will seek to cut funding for groups that delegitimize Israel
Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked on Wednesday called a decision by British students to boycott Israel anti-Semitism and vowed to fight back against efforts to delegitimize Israel with a campaign of counter boycotts.
Speaking from the Knesset podium over heckling from opposition members, Shaked said she would go after groups that support boycotting Israel by subjecting them to sanctions and other penalties.
“We will mobilize world Jewry and lovers of Israel, and we will boycott those who boycott us,” she said. “We will boycott the boycotters. We will work to stop the funding of those groups. We will cut connections. They will pay a price for the boycotts.”
Shaked’s speech came a day after the British National Union of Students voted to support the Boycott Divestment Sanctions movement, which calls for an economic, academic and cultural boycott of Israel.
The move has been roundly criticized in Jerusalem. Earlier Wednesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lashed out at the group for acting to boycott Israel but not the Islamic State terror group.
“They boycott Israel but they refuse to boycott ISIS. That tells you everything you want to know about the BDS movement. They condemn Israel and do not condemn ISIS; they condemn themselves,” he said in a joint press conference with Canadian Foreign Minister Robert Nicholson.
Shaked said that BDS advocates concentrate not only on the West Bank, but seek to destroy the State of Israel’s very existence.
“This is anti-Semitism in a new guise,” she said. “The symptoms are the same. The old anti-Semitism dehumanized the Jews. Now it is doing the same thing to the Jewish state.”
Shaked said that the world was hypocritically focused on Israel to the exclusion of countries where crimes against humanity are being committed on a regular basis.
“Hundreds of thousands of children, women and men are being slaughtered in Syria and the world is silent,” she said. In Arab countries women are raped and people beheaded, and the world is silent. Homosexuals are put to death in Iran, and the world is silent, she said.
Zahava Gal-on, head of the opposition Meretz party, replied to Shaked, telling her that while she opposed boycotting Israel, she also found the “victimhood policies” of the current government “intolerable.”
“The ones who are working for the boycott movement are in the Netanyahu government,” she said.