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Israel’s UN delegation hosts conference to combat anti-Israel boycotts

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Two thousand participants took part in a conference yesterday at the United Nations’ (UN) headquarters in New York on combating the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

The conference, titled “Building Bridges, Not Boycotts,” was hosted jointly by Israel’s delegation to the UN and a dozen pro-Israel organisations and bodies. It drew students, legal professionals and activists. Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon proclaimed: “Here, from the parliament of Nations, we commit to fighting BDS on campuses, in the courts and in the halls of the UN. We will not allow the forces of hate to demonise Israel.”

Professor Alan Johnson, senior research fellow at BICOM, was attending the meeting, and participated in a forum on delegitimastion of Israel in the realm of the media. Others who addressed the audience gathered in the UN General Assembly included Justice Elyakim Rubinstein, vice president of Israel’s Supreme Court, Jay Sekulow, chief legal Counsel of the American Center for Law, and Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress. Lauder said that BDS is “strictly a campaign to delegitimise Israel,” but in reality it “is simply the latest attempt to deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination”.

In a recorded message, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “Why does the BDS movement focus on an open society like Israel, and not the mass-murdering dictatorships of North Korea, Iran, or Syria?” Netanyahu contended that “BDS has nothing to do with human rights, nothing to do with justice.”

Following the plenary session, two parallel workshops took placed, titled “Fighting BDS on Campus” and “Legal Aspects of Boycotts and De-legitimisation”. Ambassador Danon emphasised that the summit aimed to “create practical tools to battle BDS by training students to serve as ‘ambassadors’ against boycotts”.

Yesterday’s conference came just a week after Israel’s State Comptroller issued a report which sharply criticised Israel’s current attempts to battle BDS.  The report suggested that the division of labour between the Foreign Ministry, Ministry of Strategic Affairs and the Ministry of Diaspora Affairs is ineffective and confused. It called for Israel’s security cabinet to “evaluate the existing functional mode”.