Israel Matzav

Why Israelis should be rooting for #Brexit

Greetings from an airline lounge in Paris, where the caterer is Jewish but the food isn't Kosher :-(

Yes, it's a travel day again.

Tomorrow Britain may vote to secede from the European Union in a process known as Brexit. If you're an Israeli, you should be rooting for that to happen. Here's why.

Should supporters of the ‘Leave’ campaign win the day this Thursday there’ll be aftershocks aplenty — and Israel too will feel the pain. Yet paying a short-term price will be worth the long-term gain: a victory for Britain’s exit from the EU is a preferable outcome both for Israel and Europe.

Diplomatically, Israel is better off negotiating separately with 28 foreign offices than with the European foreign service — the EEAS. As Michel Gurfienkel, the founder and president of the Jean Jacques Rousseau Institute, perceptively wrote: "the EU’s decision-making process, at French insistence but with British acquiescence, is based on the principle of unanimity or near-unanimity rather than on majority opinion."

Once France adopted a pro-Arab policy, for reasons of grandeur and later due to the increasing weight of its Muslim minority, it could use its position as part of the bloc's traditional motor to accentuate the EU's anti-Israel diplomatic tilt. The current French-inspired international conference to which the EU foreign ministers have subscribed is a case in point. After an anti-Israel vote, some of Israel's friends within the EU rush to explain that they disagreed but had to go along with the resolution to be good Europeans. For Israel it would be beneficial to rob them of this excuse.

The EU foreign service with pretensions to represent a great power status unflaggingly pummels Israel to compensate for Europe's prostrate behavior towards the likes of Turkey and Iran. The EU intervenes in our politics by engaging and empowering NGOs from one side of the political spectrum and thumbs its nose at our sovereignty by illegally building houses and roads in disputed areas whose ultimate disposition can only be decided by direct negotiations. 

It is hard to feel benevolence towards a body whose representatives at UNESCO voted for a resolution that denied a Jewish connection to Jerusalem. It is difficult to take their condemnations of anti-Semitism at face value when Jews in Europe are compelled to take off their kippot and pull out their mezuzahs to disguise their identity and protect their safety.

The music that emanates from the corridors of Berlaymont is that the nation state is an anachronism. Israel, by providing a counter-example, angers the mandarins of Brussels. 

Read it all. I could not agree more.

Labels: Brexit, Britain, European anti-Semitism, European Union

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:50 PM