Ehud Barak’s office announced tonight that he had cancelled a planned trip to France, where he was to take part in the dedication of the Israeli pavillion at the Eurosatory International Defense Week there and have consultations with the French foreign and defense ministers. The purported reason for the cancellation as relayed by his spokesperson, was that he had to remain in Israel to help assemble the panel of experts to investigate the Gaza flotilla massacre.
A confidential Israeli source informs me (and AP confirms) that the real reason was that Palestinian activists in France had filed legal complaints against him over his involvement in the flotilla affair. He was afraid he might be arrested.
I understand as well that his advance security detail discovered an inordinate number of pudgy dark-skinned tennis players in dark glasses running around the hotel where he planned to stay. For those lacking a sense of satire, that was a joke.
I have written a number of times here about the international campaign demanding accountability for Israel’s behavior. The more outrageous the acts that country engages in the more its leaders will be constrained from exercising their right to travel abroad to defend those acts. Both BDS and the use of international law have contributed to an ostracism of Israel on the world stage. If Israel continues along the path it has chosen this will only get worse.
That is why the Israeli government and its right wing apologists like Alan Dershowitz, Elie Wiesel, Gerald Steinberg and Im Tirtzu have so savagely attacked the Goldstone Report, Judge Goldstone and the Israeli human rights NGO community.
Israel’s PIETA
http://www.propheticimagery.com/Gaza%20Poem/The%20Cleansing%20of%20CoExistence.htm
Israel wants to be ostracised. People here think
the whole world is antisemitic, that israel is so powerful it doesn’t need anyone. This is now the majority, not the lunatic fringe. The day of the massacere people were saying its time we start a ‘gog and magog’ war vs the whole world. Its a nation with paranoid schizophrneia. sad thing is, this country is still standing only because our leaders have chosen responsibility over democracy.
See:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1286220/Mossad-agent-arrested-Hamas-Dubai-murder.html
He is alleged to have abused a procedure allowing relatives of holocaust victims fast-track access to German passports.
Mossad may think this appropriate, not many others will.
Barak, meanwhile, may find that any EU state is equally risky, due to the new European Arrest Warrant. A legal instrument by which someone can be suddenly arrested in England or Denmark, say, and conveyed to Greece to serve a sentence after a second trial which they were never told about. (You can be acquitted, but the prosecution can appeal and the appeal court can convict you, without your own lawyer being told about the appeal hearing until afterwards, let alone being allowed to represent you or challenge whatever “evidence” is put up at the secret retrial. Medawar fears that Israeli government lawyers may drool with envy at this. Until it’s used on someone from their side. And the Greeks were significant contributors to the relief flotilla, so it might be. Medawar doesn’t wish the Greek legal system on anybody, not even Barak, but there’s a sort of natural justice where people reap what they sow…)
I would dearly love to see him arrested, convicted and sentenced.
i really want him behind bars
even if this is for 1 day
the shame and humiliation will be worth it
The Israeli government is trying to bully the Polish government (have you ever tried to bully Poles? it does not work) into sending the arrested man to Israel and not Germany.
The EU arrest warrant system simply does not have a clause in it which allows a government not to extradite the subject to the country which raised the warrant.