Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee chair MK Simcha Rothman says the rash of sanctions against Israeli citizens imposed by the United States and some of its allies are the result of a “modern day libel” promoted by the United Nations.
Speaking to the Jerusalem Press Club on Wednesday, the Religious Zionism lawmaker discussed the special session held by his committee to discuss the sanctions imposed recently by Western governments against Israelis living in Judea and Samaria.
The first such sanctions were imposed by the US government on February, but Canada and the UK soon followed, with all of them claiming the Israelis were guilty of “settler violence against Palestinians.” Japan has also joined the list, freezing assets and barring money transfers against the sanctioned individuals.
“Sadly, our friends — really, friends from around the world — when they’re imposing sanctions on Israelis they’re not really respecting our sovereignty or democracy,” Rothman said.
Astonishingly, the lawmaker quoted a Hebrew University law professor who showed that the data “is just not there” to support claims on ‘violent settlers’ in what Rothman has described as the modern blood libel.
“Whenever a Jew and sometimes not even a Jew goes on the Temple Mount to visit
and there are no violent acts whatsoever, it is counted by the UN as ‘settler violence,'” Rothman revealed.
“For me it’s a crazy fact and I think that many, many countries and many, many journalists that report on data from the UN saying, ‘Oh look, there’s an increase in settler violence,’ I hope if they’re honest people they would say that’s not settler violence,” he said.
“Another example that was presented (in Wednesday’s hearing) was that in Maale Adumim, a city in Judea, there was an attack by a terrorist that wounded a female soldier from Caracal, which is a unit in the IDF which both men and women serve together.
“A female soldier that was wounded during the attack at the last minute really saved herself by shooting the terrorist. In the beginning the terrorist was wounded, and a day later he died (of his wounds),” Rothman related.
But unbelievably, “this counts as two acts of settler violence,” he said. “A terrorist who attacked a city, a Jewish city in Judea and Samaria, and a soldier defended against this attack, this counts as not one [incident] because the terrorist didn’t die on the spot, so it counts as two acts of settler violence.
“It enters into the statistics of the UN and based on those statistics Western
countries like the US, like Japan, like the EU (European Union) say ‘okay, there is settler violence, we have to impose sanctions,” Rothman explained.
“For me, it was new information that needs to be taken into account both by decision makers and by the media when describing this,” he added.
