RUTHFULLY YOURS

It would be truly embarrassing if a Turkey-Israel normalization results in new arms shipments into Gaza and rockets over Israeli skies — with the only achievement being a temporary peace with Turkey’s Islamists, who never hide their ideological kinship with Hamas.

The future Turkish and Israeli ambassadors would always have to keep their bags packed, ready to return to their own capitals at the first dispute – which could be caused by Israeli retaliation against Arab terrorism or anything that may make Erdogan roar in front of cameras.

How do you shake hands with a man whom you know ideologically hates you and wishes to mess up things at his earliest convenience?

None of this happened half a century ago; the timeline here covers only a span of a year and a half: A Turkish-Kurdish pop star wrote on her Twitter account, “May God bless Hitler. He did far less [than he should have done to Jews].” The mayor of Ankara replied: “I applaud you!” Hundreds of angry Turks, hurling rocks, tried to break into the Israeli diplomatic missions in Ankara and Istanbul. The mayor of Ankara said: “We will conquer the consulate of the despicable murderers.” He blamed the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris on Israel’s Mossad. Islamist columnists close to the government suggested imposing a “wealth tax” on Turkish Jews (who are full citizens). A governor threatened to suspend restoration work at a synagogue. And a credible research group at the Kadir Has University in Istanbul found in a poll that Turks view Israel as the top threat to Turkey.

Samir Kuntar murdered four Israelis. One of his victims was a four-year-old girl, Einat Haran. Kuntar smashed her skull. Kuntar was killed this week in Syria while helping President Bashar Assad commit war crimes against his own citizens.

Senior Palestinian official Sultan Abu Al-Einein evidently believes that murdering Jews is not a “despicable crime,” but killing an arch-terrorist such as Kuntar is a “despicable crime.”

When the Western-backed Palestinian Authority openly endorses terrorists and names streets, squares and schools after them, Palestinian leaders are sending a message to their people that murdering Jews is a noble and dignified act. This show of solidarity with a baby-killer is the direct result of ongoing incitement against Israel and Jews in mosques, the press and social media in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In this sick, twisted society that the Europeans have bought and paid for, anyone who murders Jews is considered a role model. Anyone who supports peace with Israel is denounced as a “traitor.”

When, in the early 2000s, Arab activists called for a boycott of the Jewish state, it wasn’t especially high on the Israeli agenda. After all, Israel was busy subduing the second Intifada, constructing a security barrier to stop terrorists from getting into Israeli towns and cities, and preparing to pull civilians and the military out of the Gaza Strip. Fast-forward to today, however, and a significant proportion of Israeli diplomacy and pro-Israel advocacy around the world is dedicated to battling the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign. BDS is a diffuse movement — mostly confined to Europe, North America and South Africa — that advocates boycotting Israelis and their nation’s institutions, urges states to sanction Israel, and pressures corporations to divest from the country. Meanwhile, opposition to BDS unites Jews and Zionists, regardless of differences of opinion over Israel’s foreign policy, more than most other issues. Whence, then, did BDS arise, and why? Has it been successful, and what does it say about its supporters? Does it justify the attention Israel and others afford it and, crucially, can it be defeated?

BDS is often dated back to July 2005, when more than a hundred Arab organisations, principally in the West Bank and Gaza, called for a boycott of Israel. But that declaration was in fact the culmination of several years of agitation. Omar Barghouti — widely considered to be the founder and face of BDS — was among several Arab activists to call for such a boycott a year earlier in Ramallah. Earlier still, in April 2002, a letter was published in the Guardian that called for an academic boycott of Israel. It garnered more than 700 signatures (although a counter-petition on the internet boasted more than a thousand), and by October 2002 divestment petitions were circulating on more than 50 campuses in the United States and elsewhere.

After the massacres in Paris on November 13, the US Secretary of State John Kerry made a statement so disgraceful you had to read it, rub your eyes, and read it again to comprehend the extent of his folly: “There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that,” Kerry began in the laboured English of an over-promoted middle manager.

“There was a sort of particularised focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, OK, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorise people.”

The staff of “Charlie Hebdo” in 2006: The cartoonists Cabu, Charb, Tignous and Honoré (first, second, fourth and fifth from left) were all killed in the 2015 attack, and Riss, third from left, was wounded. Meurisse, second from right, happened to be out of the office (© Joel Saget/AFP/ Getty Images)

Did you get that? Then allow me to translate. Kerry believes the satirists Islamist gunmen killed at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris’s 11th arrondissement on January 5 had it coming. It is not that they deserved to die. John Kerry is a New England liberal, after all, and does not endorse the death penalty for journalists. But liberalism is a two-faced creed. It can mean that you believe in individual freedom and abhor every variety of prejudice, including the prejudice that allows men to shoot journalists dead for producing a magazine they disapprove of. Or it can mean that you go to such lengths to take account of your enemy’s opinions you become indistinguishable from him.