Loyal Al-Monitor readers would not have been surprised by the report in Foreign Policy regarding the involvement of opposition member and former Justice Minister Tzipi Livni and former President Shimon Peres in diplomatic issues that are the purview of the Israeli government. According to the report, the Livni and Peres recommended to US Secretary of State John Kerry that he torpedo the proposed Palestinian resolution to the UN Security Council until after the March 17 elections in Israel. They claimed that adoption of the resolution would hurt the prospects of the center-left in the Knesset elections. Six days before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his friends on the right raised their voices in protest, Al-Monitor reported on Dec. 15: “[Labor Chairman Isaac] Herzog and Livni have convinced top administration officials in Washington that recognition of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines, passed with a US abstention at the Security Council, will push Israeli voters into the arms of the right.”

Big deal. Senior opposition figures recommended to a friendly administration that it refrain from a unilateral move that is opposed to Israeli government policy! Newspaper archives are full to overflowing with Livni and Peres quotes of recent years decrying unilateral diplomatic moves. There are no greater symbols of the sacred “process” that has been treading water for the past 20 years on its way to nowhere and of peace drifting away. Shortly before heading off to Rome Dec. 12 to plead with Kerry to repel the Palestinian and French proposals, Netanyahu told reporters that these proposals would result in terrorism in the heart of Israel. Instead of lashing out at Peres and Livni for their diplomatic activity, he should have sent them flowers.

The hysterical response to the contacts of these two with Kerry, as well as the enlistment of the 6 million Holocaust victims to protest a series of decisions by international bodies, are definite symptoms of the anxiety that is gripping Netanyahu. “Today we have seen unsettling examples of European hypocrisy,” said the prime minister on Dec. 17, adding, "In Geneva, they are calling for an investigation against Israel for war crimes, while in Luxembourg the European court removed Hamas from the terrorist list. It looks like there are too many people in Europe, on the ground where 6 million Jews were slaughtered, who haven't learned a thing.”

Besides these decisions, also on Dec. 17, the European Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of recognizing a Palestinian state, in principle (498 in favor, 88 against and 11 abstentions). On the same day, the signatory states to the Fourth Geneva Convention convened and condemned the continued Israeli occupation of the territories. A central article in the decision was dedicated to the ban on an occupying power to settle its citizens in the areas under its control. In this case, too, use was made by inference of the Holocaust of European Jewry. A statement issued by the Foreign Ministry under instructions of Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, who ordered a boycott of the Geneva meeting, said, “History teaches us that there cannot be one law for the Jewish state and another for all other states.” Liberman is also boycotting Sweden's foreign minister, who is coming to Israel for a ceremony commemorating the “Righteous among the Nations,” missing Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.