The Jewish state has scored a series of small but significant diplomatic victories in the past two weeks. These range from a vote in the Czech parliament calling on its government to show “respect” for Jerusalem’s status as Israel’s capital, to Denmark’s decision to withhold some $8 million from organizations that it believes might be supporting BDS and incitement to terror. Evelyn Gordon comments:
Several factors contributed to these victories. One is the way Israeli NGOs are serving as force multipliers for Israeli diplomacy. . . . [Another is that] official Israel began pushing back against [support for anti-Israel NGOs, Palestinian incitement, and so forth] in talks with European governments, thereby depriving them of a perfect excuse for inaction. Europe will never be more pro-Israel than Israel’s own government.
Second, Israel has finally developed the confidence to play hardball, as it did by downgrading ties with New Zealand and Senegal, [both] co-sponsors of UN Security Council Resolution 2334, [condemning settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem], last December. Ties with Senegal were restored this week after the Muslim-majority country promised to support Israel’s bid for observer status at the African Union, which it had previously opposed. The New Zealand rupture is expected to end soon.
This confidence undoubtedly stems in part from Israel’s growing diplomatic strength outside the West, as highlighted most recently by Benjamin Netanyahu’s address on Sunday to the summit of the Economic Community of Western African States (ECOWAS). He was the first Israeli leader to address ECOWAS, which even moved the summit from Saturday to Sunday to accommodate him. The group invited him even though two of its fifteen members have no diplomatic relations with Israel, and it pointedly preferred him to another nonmember guest: Morocco’s king. The West African monarch announced he would skip the summit rather than attend alongside Netanyahu, but that gambit signally failed to result, as it once would have, in Israel being disinvited.
Read more on Evelyn Gordon: http://evelyncgordon.com/israels-diplomacy-gets-serious-and-gets-results/