In this week’s analysis, Caroline Glick focuses on the left’s efforts to demonize and destabilize the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. This week, they disseminated a statement from Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israeli national security minister, which they edited to make it seem that he had said Israeli lives are more valuable than Palestinian lives.
Ben-Gvir actually said that with all due respect to the goal of permitting Palestinians to drive without roadblocks, a rising number of Palestinian terrorists are murdering Israelis on the roads, so the lives of Israelis are more important (meaning life supersedes the convenience of travel). BDS campaigners have used the edited statement to propagate the slander of Israel as an apartheid state, leading to condemnations from the U.S. State Department, the European Union and even from American supermodel Bella Hadid, whose father is Palestinian.
Caroline explains that the left’s quest to demonize the government has led its members to take leading roles in the BDS campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel’s existence. She cites several examples, including a move by prominent U.S.-Israeli Times of Israel writers to convince American Jewish organizations to boycott the Netanyahu government.
Next, she discusses the Israeli government’s decision to form a commission of inquiry into law enforcement’s widespread, illicit use of spyware tools developed for counterterrorism operations.
In coordination with the attorney general and the state prosecution, the Israeli police in recent years has unlawfully spied directly on more than 1,000 innocent Israeli citizens with the powerful NSO Pegasus spyware tool. When this illicit policy was exposed in the media last year, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara appointed her deputy, Amit Merari, to investigate her own actions, as Merari was responsible for approving the spyware’s use. Unsurprisingly, Merari found no reason for concern.
The left, which proclaims itself the guardian of Israeli liberal values, now loudly opposes the commission of inquiry, insisting that “There is no right to privacy without ‘democracy.’”
Caroline ends the analysis with an update on Israel’s interception of advanced Iranian claymore explosives along Israel’s Jordanian border, in addition to the rising tide of Iranian involvement in Palestinian terrorism in Judea and Samaria, and increased prospects of regional war.