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| Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu |
Benjamin Netanyahu has invoked Europe’s Fascist past to attack the growing calls for a boycott of Israel, comparing it to embargoes imposed on Jewish businesses by the Nazis and other anti-Semitic groups.
“The most disgraceful thing is to have people on the soil of Europe talking about the boycott of Jews. I think that’s an outrage,” the Israeli prime minister told a conference of US Jewish organisations in Jerusalem.
“In the past, anti-Semites boycotted Jewish businesses, and today they call for the boycott of the Jewish state and, by the way, only the Jewish state.”
Mr Netanyahu’s fiercest broadside yet against the boycott movement followed several meetings among senior government figures over how to tackle what Israel sees as a looming threat of economic isolation.
Mr Netanyahu singled out the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, a group run by pro-Palestinian intellectuals that calls for a boycott of Israeli goods due to Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land. He called the group’s members “classical anti-Semites in modern garb” whose true goal was the destruction of the Israeli state. » Robert Tait, Jerusalem | Tuesday, February 18, 2014
