I srael’s defence minister has urged French Jews to leave France and move to the Jewish state as the Israeli government continued to lash out at the international community in the wake of UN resolution criticising its settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Four days after the US allowed the UN Security Council to censure Israeli settlement building, Israel’s government is on a heated rhetorical campaign against the 14 countries that voted against it.
It has cut aid programmes, summoned ambassadors for angry admonishing and Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has apparently decided to snub Theresa May at next month’s Davos meeting in retaliation for Britain’s vote. The Israeli government is also focusing on discrediting a French-hosted summit on Israeli-Palestinian peace scheduled to be held in January in the final days before Barack Obama leaves office.
Mr Netanyahu fears the summit will be used by the outgoing US president as a final chance to leave a mark on the Middle East peace process before Donald Trump takes over.
Avigdor Lieberman, the defence minister, said the summit was “a modern day version of the Dreyfus trial”, the infamous 19th century trial that exposed widespread anti-semitism in France.
“This is not a peace conference but rather a tribunal against the State of Israel. This is a conference whose only role is to undermine Israel’s security,” Mr Lieberman said. “On the defendant’s bench, instead of one Jew, will be the entire State of Israel.”
He urged French Jews to migrate to Israel saying it was “the only answer that should be given to this plot”.Mr Netanyahu irked the French government by making a similar suggestion after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January 2015, implying that France was unable to protect its roughly 450,000 Jews from jihadist attacks.
Israel’s goal is to discourage any new international action on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until Mr Trump takes office on January 20.
The president-elect criticised the White House for not using America’s veto power to stop the UN from censuring Israel and has signaled that he intends to robustly support Mr Netanyahu.
He kept up his criticism on Twitter on Tuesday, saying: “The United Nations has such great potential but right now it is just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time. So sad!”
Israel accused the Obama administration of engineering the UN resolution as a parting shot against Israel and offered to supply the incoming Trump administration with “rather ironclad” evidence of behind the scenes US maneuvering.
Israel also said in response to the vote that it was “temporarily limiting” its diplomatic contacts with the countries that voted against it at the UN, including Britain.
It has already recalled ambassadors from Senegal and New Zealand, who sponsored the resolution, and said it would limit diplomatic travel to Israel by foreign leaders. A trip by the prime minister of Ukraine to Israel has already been cancelled in the wake of the vote.
Mr Netanyahu’s domestic political opponents criticised his handling of the diplomatic crisis even as they voiced their own opposition to the UN resolution.
Yair Lapid, the leader of the centrist Yesh Atid party, warned of a “dangerous deterioration in Israel’s foreign relations, including with the largest world powers and some of our best friends” and said Mr Netanyahu had engaged in “hysterical behaviour”.
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