A clause in Likud’s coalition agreement with the Religious Zionism Party led by Bezalel Smotrich states that “the government will not approve Israel’s accession to the Istanbul Treaty,” Walla reported Sunday.
The Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence which was signed in Istanbul on May 11, 2011, is a human rights treaty against violence against women and domestic violence. On March 20, 2021, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced his country’s withdrawal from the convention – before Turkey, like Israel, had stepped into what amounts to a trap intended to force countries that offer temporary shelter to refugees from conflict areas to accept these refugees permanently.
On May 26, 2022, Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar also saw the light and delayed a government vote on his own initiative to sign on to the Istanbul Convention. Now, according to Sunday’s report, Smotrich anchored avoiding the convention in the next government’s political foundations.
The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel issued an angry statement saying: “The fact that the incoming prime minister is willing to forsake women to psychological torture and unabating violence is inconceivable.”
But the Istanbul Convention is not only about the rights of women. It’s also about undermining host countries who make the mistake of opening their gates to hordes of refugees in the hope of one day sending them home.
On its face, the Istanbul Convention aims at preventing violence, offering victim protection, and ending the impunity of perpetrators. But seeing as the ancient city of Troy, the birthplace of the Trojan Horse, is only about 140 miles from Istanbul, one should beware of the gift-bearing Greeks, who currently reside in Brussels.
If you care about the Jewish future of the Jewish State, you should familiarize yourself with articles 59, 60, and 61 of the Istanbul Convention. At the time, I couldn’t figure out what would be the upside of joining the convention, but the downside is devastating.
Every one of these three articles would destroy Israel’s doctrine of being a shelter for Jews from around the world. It would trump Israel’s laws and regulations that try to block the mass entry of hostile PA Arabs via family reunification. It would render Israeli governments helpless before any foreigner who contrives to subvert its immigration policy with a sob story.
Today, a foreign resident married to an Israeli citizen must undergo a staggered procedure until obtaining legal status in Israel. Since Article 59 abolishes this tiered procedure, the Interior Ministry is saying it demanded and was approved of a reservation regarding this article.
Article 60 is even worse. It states that gender-based violence trumps whatever laws the signatories may have – and unlike Article 59, an annex is attached to the convention that does not make it possible to declare a reservation regarding Article 60 upon ratification of the convention. And so, a woman who can prove to an Israeli court or committee that she had undergone genital mutilation, a ceremony performed on millions of women in Africa and the Arab countries, will gain refugee status that would keep her in Israel forever, never mind if the mutilation never took place in Israel.
Article 61 establishes the principle of no return in addition to the recognition of permanent refugee status. According to 61, women who have suffered from gender-based violence and arrived in Israel will not be returned to a country where they face the danger of discrimination or violence and will remain in Israel for the remainder of their lives, subject to section 5/a of the Entry into Israel Act.
If the document’s legalese is still unclear, just take one look at South Tel Aviv today, mired in thousands of illegal aliens making the lives of the poor Israelis who can’t move out of a living hell. Now multiply the number of destitute foreigners.
In short, the main purpose of the Istanbul Convention is not to influence the immigration policies of the signatory states in favor of suffering women, but to influence their domestic policies to follow a radical-progressive agenda.
Finally, why did Erdogan withdraw from the convention bearing the name of Turkey’s biggest city? In an official statement, the Turkish Presidency blamed the LGBT community for the withdrawal from the convention, arguing that “the Istanbul Convention––originally intended to promote women’s rights––was hijacked by a group of people attempting to normalize homosexuality, which is incompatible with Turkey’s social and family values. Hence, the decision to withdraw.”
At last, Israel has at least one MK who is as astute as Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
It has been pointed out that Israel faces two fundamentally different sets of considerations from the countries who have joined the treaty: first, Israel is unique in the broad powers its Supreme Court has asserted. In other countries, signing the treaty would not provide a basis for judicial review of every aspect of social issues related to gender issues or LGBT and trans rights, but in Israel, you better believe it would; and second, Israel is unique in being the subject of a massive campaign by anti-Zionist NGOs to hijack international forums as well as the ICC against it. In no time, as soon as Israel joins the Istanbul Convention, those well-financed, deeply antisemitic groups will make it yet another arena for Israel bashing, this time dressed up as Zionist abuse of Arab women.
