Rivers of condemnation, criticism and vitriol have washed over the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem since its executive director's appearance before the UN Security Council. I searched for an iota of disagreement with a single fact or figure Hagai El-Ad presented at the debate on Israel’s West Bank settlements and came up short. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dubbed B’Tselem a “negligible organization” and claimed, “Most of the Israeli public knows the truth.” But Netanyahu did not point to any distortion in El-Ad’s presentation and hid behind the mantra that the root of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was not Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its Jewish settlements there, but rather the ongoing Palestinian refusal to recognize the Jewish state. The chairman of the centrist Yesh Atid, Yair Lapid, echoed Netanyahu's label of “negligible organization” and claimed B’Tselem and its likes had “severed themselves” from Zionism. He, too, ignored the content of El-Ad’s review. His reaction went up on Facebook even before El-Ad took the stage in New York.
So what enraged the right, and what got politicians and pundits who define themselves as “centrist” and even “moderate left” so agitated? The answer lies in Netanyahu’s remark: “What these organizations fail to achieve in democratic elections, they try to achieve through international force. … We will continue to defend justice and our state against international pressures.” Lapid put it in crowd-pleasing terms: “They decided to join up with the anti-Semitic [boycott, divestment and sanctions] organizations in order to force Israel to its knees.”