DIPLOMAT CULLED

Pretoria permanently withdraws its ambassador from Israel

By Peter Fabricius• 5 April 2019

Minister Lindiwe Sisulu. (Photo by Gallo Images / Thapelo Maphakela)
 

International Relations Minister Lindiwe Sisulu says withdrawing SA ambassador is just ‘stage one’ in downgrading relations with Tel Aviv.
 

The South African government has implemented what International Relations Minister Sisulu calls “stage one” of its programme of downgrading relations with Israel, by withdrawing its ambassador from Tel Aviv permanently.
 
Minister of International Relations and Co-operation Lindiwe Sisulu announced this on Wednesday evening in an address to the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA) in Johannesburg.
 
Sisulu also suggested that eventually Israel would no longer have an ambassador in South Africa. If so, the government would be going even further than the ANC did at its conference in December 2017 when it decided to direct the government “to immediately and unconditionally downgrade the South African Embassy in Israel to a Liaison Office”.
 
The ANC resolution did not direct the government also to downgrade Israel’s embassy in Pretoria.
 
Sisulu told SAIIA that the ANC already had “no relations with Israel” and would like the government to adopt that position as soon as possible.
 
In her prepared remarks for the SAIIA lecture, Sisulu said that after Israeli security forces had shot Palestinian protesters on the Israel-Gaza border in 2018, Pretoria had immediately recalled South Africa’s ambassador to Israel – Sisa Ngombane – for consultation. It had also “démarche’d” the Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Lior Keinan. To démarche is diplomatic speak for summoning a foreign diplomat and delivering a protest.
 
“We are in the process of following the downgrade resolution of the ruling party and stage one has been completed,” Sisulu continued.
 
“Our ambassador is back in South Africa and we will not be replacing him. Our liaison office in Tel Aviv will have no political mandate, no trade mandate and no development co-operation mandate.
 
“It will not be responsible for trade and commercial activities. The focus of the Liaison Office would be on consular and the facilitation of people-to-people relations.”
 
Sisulu did not actually deliver these prepared remarks at SAIIA but was asked there to confirm her written announcement and also to say if her government had assessed the implications of a downgrade on relations with Israel. She had indicated in March that relations would only be downgraded once the implications had been assessed.
Sisulu replied to this question at SAIIA by confirming:
 
“We are putting together a programme of downgrading our relations with Israel in line with the resolutions which were taken by the ANC.
 
“We have a programme put in place which we will place before the ANC in response to their demands and the resolution they have taken. And we will also look at the legal implications of the agreements we have currently with Israel if there are any. And any other administrative repercussions that come out of that. 
 
“The first thing we have done is that we no longer have an ambassador in Israel. We now operate at the level of a liaison officer. So the liaison officer in Israel will deal with all the diplomatic matters in Israel. 
 
“The ambassador in Israel in South Africa is still an ambassador here until such time as we have adopted fully the resolutions of the ANC conference.”
 
This last remark seemed to imply that Pretoria might also eventually ask Israel to remove its ambassador from Pretoria, which the ANC did not demand in its resolution.
 
Israeli ambassador Keinan said on Thursday he had “no comment regarding South African policymaking”.
 
At SAIIA, Sisulu was asked why the government allowed the University of Cape Town, a partly government-funded institution, to have relations with Israeli universities.
 
Last week the UCT Council overturned a decision by the university’s senate to cut off relations with Israeli universities.
 
“The reason why public institutions have relations with countries the ANC has decided to sever relations with is possibly because we have been slow in getting to where we should,” Sisulu said.
 
“If we had done it much faster we would have a very clear policy where we direct even public institutions like the one you are talking about (with) what the government’s position is in relation to Israel. 
 
“The ANC’s position in relation to Israel is very clear. We have no relations with Israel. That’s what we would like the government to adopt as soon as possible,” Sisulu said.
 
She said the government would eventually deal with the matter of public institutions such as UCT and their relations with Israel. DM

April 5, 2019

The Anti-Semitic Con

by Paul Edwards

With the Putin/Russia Collusion Fairytale debunked, the undeniable cancer of real foreign interference in our government demands an honest airing.

Since American politics is mortally corrupt, one might wonder why bother to expose one prime cause of its ethical degeneracy.  If the beast is dead, what use is determining what killed it?  Well, it isn’t quite dead and we have to live with it.  If the public knew one country has done more to subvert our government than all others combined it might raise enough hell to stop it.

In terms of influence, there can be no serious denial that Israel exerts by far the most powerful suasion of any foreign power on America.  Influence exerted by a foreign power’s registered lobby is legitimate per our toothless  protocol.  Israel’s is not so registered, but… details, details.  So, when Republicans invite Bibi to smarmily insult a sitting President in a joint session of Congress, that’s influence, not interference.  When, besides financing most Senators and Representatives elections, Israel takes them on cushy, free PR junkets to Tel Aviv, that’s influence, not interference.

Conversely, when Clintonista subversion of the Sanders campaign appears on Wikileaks and is instantly imputed to Russia and Putin–without proof and against expert technical evidence–that’s not influence, it’s Russki interference.  More absurdly, when–again, without proof–the same Dem CFOs howl that Putin Trolls bought chump change worth of dingy ads on Facebook that swung the election to Trump that’s… but you get the picture.

What is obvious and has long been so–and has been emphasized by two years of fraud and insanity regarding imagined Russian collusion–is that influence is what your friends have; interference is what your enemies do.

Why, when it is so blatantly obvious as to be a source of outspoken pride for them, is the fact that Israel’s right-wing ruling clique brazenly and continually interferes in American government in the most aggressive and offensive way, universally denied?  You want flagrant foreign collusion with high officials in U.S. government?  Open your eyes.  And your mind…

The reason it’s officially denied is that Israel’s Congressional whores know that not to do so violates their deal.  Not to back Israel unquestioningly  terminates it, and the loss of that money means loss of office… to say nothing of the beating they’d take in the press and on their reputations.

The great mass of Americans won’t admit what many can’t help but know because they, too, fear being attacked for such bold honesty.  They are equally vulnerable to rough handling from the same source: the massively powerful Israel Lobby, a unified phalanx of militant American Zionists.
To be clear: Zionism has always insisted that Israel exists for Jews only.

The Israel Lobby–financed by vast American Zionist wealth–potent as it is, could not leverage our politics if its tactics were exposed, and it knows it.   History gives it the key that makes rational assessment of Israel’s policies impossible: the Holocaust and the true anti-Semitism that was its cause.

Evocation of that horror allows any critique of Israeli government to be sleazily labelled Anti-Semitism, and so to effectively nullify argument.  The dishonest and cynical Israel Lobby uses this tactic shamelessly to blunt and derail sound criticism or even plain examination of Israeli state behavior.

What then is Anti-Semitism?  By definition it is antipathy or hatred of the Jewish people as a whole.  An Anti-Semite espouses that categorical prejudice, and Anti-Semitism in word or deed pertains to Jews in toto.  In contrast, behavior that is ugly, hateful, or injurious but not directed at Jews as a whole, though execrable, is not Anti-Semitic, just as it’s possible to hate a Catholic or Muslim without hating their religion or their people.

It follows then, that criticism, even vicious, hateful criticism of the Israeli State, is not inherently Anti-Semitic, and the claim is false on its face.  To attack the Israeli State is not to attack Jews as a people since Israel is not home to most of Jewry and its polity by no means defines or represents Jews in all their broad, complex range of beliefs, practices, and principles.

To say that criticizing the brutal, repressive apartheid Israeli government’s actions is Anti-Semitic is no more legitimate than to say that condemnation of the American State’s vicious imperialist wars makes one anti-American.

This disingenuous con needs to named and refuted around the world.

Is there criticism of Israel that is clearly Anti-Semitic?  Of course, there is!  Plenty of it.  Anti-Semitism is no less real and evil because it does not apply to all critiques of Israel or all insults to Jews or Jewish entities.  Precisely because Anti-Semitism is so vile and toxic a disease, and because it will continue to live in its odious carriers, it is critically important not to vitiate the ubiquitous contempt it arouses by cynically muddling its meaning.

The dishonest and defensive crying of wolf that the government of Israel and the Israel Lobby deploy against any criticism of their history and policy is, in addition to being morally contemptible, deeply counterproductive in terms of Israel’s standing in world opinion.  Mounting a transparently false, blanket, all-purpose lament as a cover for their most obvious and glaring crimes and cruelties cannot prevent the world from seeing them for the corrupt and unjust power they are and fiercely, adamantly opposing them.

Beyond the damage Israel’s cowardly dishonesty does to itself, a more critical concern for Americans concerns what it has done and is doing to exacerbate the rolling debacle of our misruled and floundering country.  The Israel Lobby, Zionism’s American voice, wielding the bogus trope of  Anti-Semitism as a club, infects and pollutes through its agents and activists every niche of our government from the Presidency and Congress, to Federal Departments and Bureaus, to State and local offices.

Without Zionist acceptance Trump would not have been President, but neither would Obama.  Through the Lobby’s diligence we have made our country hated by carrying Israel’s dirty water in the Middle East, crippled and hamstrung enlightened policy at home, and been afflicted with such creatures of nightmare as the Harpy, Nikki Haley, bughouse pseudo-Christian loon, Mike Pompeo, and murderous psychopath, John Bolton.

Nothing suggests the death grip Israel and its Lobby have on our fate can be broken.  So long as the Anti-Semitic Con is viable, even our security is in jeopardy with its blind, sick, demented chosen monsters in charge.

The fable of the eagle and scorpion comes painfully to mind.  When the bird, stung and bearing them both down to death, asks how the scorpion could sting it after swearing not to do so, it replies, “You knew what I was when you let me ride.”  It was all too clear what Israel was in 1947.

More articles by:Paul Edwards

 

Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net