Everything you need to know about today’s coverage of Israel and the Mideast. Join the Israel Daily News Stream on Facebook.
Today’s Top Stories
1. Cornell BDS group caught using Israeli technology, defends itself by claiming that “BDS is a tactic, not a principle.”
So urging others to boycott Israel while knowingly using its products is fine, not hypocritical, they claim. The episode is similar to earlier examples of BDS hypocrisy such as when Israeli academic Neve Gordon endorsed an academic boycott of Israel but refused to resign from his teaching post as Ben-Gurion University.
2. USA Today highlights Israeli Hollywood producer who helped purchase arms for Israel.
Nice story, tainted by a strange comparison between what he did and Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s Hollywood blacklist.
More than 60 years after a congressional Committee on Un-American Activities held hearings aimed at rooting out communist spies from Hollywood, a Hollywood producer has proudly revealed his own clandestine efforts on behalf of Israel.
Arnon Milchan, the Israeli-born businessman who owns New Regency Films, has been part of an array of blockbusters, including Pretty Woman, Fight Club and the spy thriller Mr. and Mrs. Smith. In an interview Monday with Israel’s popular show Uvda, Milchan detailed his real-life, cloak-and-dagger work on numerous operations, including the purchase of technology needed to operate nuclear weapons.
“I did it for my country and I’m proud of it,” Milchan said.
3. Anti-Semitic incidents are way up in Australia, as much as 21% over the previous year, according to a new report. The report also looks at the fallout of revelations that Prisoner X, a Mossad agent who committed suicide in Israeli custody, was Australian.
4. Daily Mail Places Netanya in the West Bank. The error was quickly corrected after a complaint from HonestReporting.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• The Independent interviews Daniel Taub, Israeli ambassador to the UK. Taub noted that the nuclear deal with Iran could bring Israel closer to Arab states that share Israel’s skepticism that Iran is about to shut down efforts to achieve nuclear weapons capabilities.
“If you look at the region you see this very radical axis that runs from Tehran to Damascus to Beirut and actually on to Gaza, and I think that we are not alone [in being worried] about it,” he said.
“There are many countries that look on these issues and it’s a reminder that if we can rise above some of our immediate differences and paradigms we actually have an awful lot in common, many of our most fundamental strategic concerns are actually aligned, and of course we would be interested in trying to deepen relationships on that basis.”
• Israel and the EU reach an agreement ending stand-off over European threats to cut funding to projects over the green line. The Wall Street Journal’s coverage alludes to the fact that public opinion in Europe is sharply opposed to an Israeli presence in the West Bank.
The deal allows Israel to participate in Horizon 2020, a €70 billion, ($95 billion) seven-year research program that will begin on Jan. 1. Israel hopes to receive hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and loans to its universities and technology companies.
Diplomats said the EU strove to strike a balance by keeping close ties to Israel and its high-tech and science communities, while recognizing European public opposition to funds benefiting Israeli settlements in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem that most in the international community consider illegal. Palestinians hope to establish a state in those territories.
• The UN General Assembly issued another six resolutions against Israel this week, including one calling on Israel to give the Golan Heights to Syria. Hillel Neuer of UN Watch noted:
The UN General Assembly’s lopsided adoption, by the end of this year, of an expected 21 resolutions on Israel, and only four on the rest of the world combined, eclipses the plight of millions of truly needy human rights victims in places like China, Russia, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia, whose critical issues are being treated with indifference, if not contempt—indeed the UN just elected each of those tyrannies to its 47-nation Human Rights Council.
• Meanwhile, the American Studies Association moves closer towards a resolution supporting academic boycott of Israel on the grounds that Israeli universities are complicit in occupying the disputed territories.
• Palestinian stone throwing becoming an increasing worry for Israelis near Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus area.
For more, see yesterday’s Israel Daily News Stream.
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