Deputy Foreign Minister Hotovely changes cadets’ course to include right-slanted tours of West Bank and East Jerusalem’s City of David archaeological site
Visitors walk at the City of David in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan in 2015.
Foreign Ministry cadets will tour West Bank settlements and learn how to defend their legality, as well as hear lectures on Judaism and tour the City of David archaeological site in East Jerusalem, officials said Sunday, in a rightward shift for the country’s diplomatic corps.
The new additions to the cadet course are a joint effort of Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovel and Foreign Ministry director Dore Gold, a confidant of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The foreign minister post is held by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Both ministry officials believe the modified cadet course will help fledgling diplomats “honestly represent the positions of the Israeli government,” Army Radio quoted unnamed Foreign Ministry sources as saying.
Among the new classes added to the cadet course are a lecture on the legality of Jewish settlements in the West Bank based on the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory; a tour of the City of David in the Silwan neighborhood near the Old City guided by David Be’eri, an official of the right-wing NGO Elad, which administers the site; a tour of the settlements guided by settler leader Benny Katzover; and a tour of the Jordan Valley devoted to the subject of Israel’s borders. This last talk will be given by Uzi Dayan, a former IDF general.
From a vantage point near the Temple Mount, Tzipi Hotovely waves the Israeli flag, with the Dome of the Rock in the background, May 1, 2014. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
From a vantage point near the Temple Mount, Tzipi Hotovely waves the Israeli flag, with the Dome of the Rock in the background, May 1, 2014. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)
“We think it doesn’t matter what your political positions are – you must know that the Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria is legal,” Hotovely told Army Radio on Sunday, using a biblical term for the West Bank.
“When I say legal, I also mean international law. It is settlement with a historical base and very deep roots,” she said.
Foreign Ministry officials told the Walla news website that Hotovely felt the cadets course had been “stuck in the same place” for years and needed to be updated.
Changes in the course’s schedule are intended to “give diplomats tools to cope with the tough questions Israeli must answer today in the international diplomatic and legal arena,” an official said.
Hotovely, a hawkish lawmaker in Likud, was recently reprimanded by Prime Minister Netanyahu for saying that she “dreams” of building the Third Temple at the Temple Mount.
Google reminds me that “manifestions” may exist in fact but not in any dictionary. Accordingly, I must make do with “manifestations”, which I consider a clumsy verbalized noun, but about which the rest of the world apparently disagrees with me.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
Settlements, or any other manifestation of the territorial imperative as applied to states and nations, are legitimized by facts on the ground, and backed by the reality of force; not by pleadings, explanations, and even the whimpers of the typically Jewish legal hasbarot that passes for manifestions of watered-down Zionism — the evidence of which would cause Ze’ev Jabotinsky to puke.
Arnold Harris, Outspeaker
Tzipi Hotovely and Dore Gold are to be commended for bringing back awareness of the justice of Israel’s cause to its diplomatic corps.
If Israel’s diplomats can’t defend Israel’s policies abroad, it contributes to the country’s delegitmization and the on-going erosion of its national standing abroad.
Israel has justice and the truth on its side but it has left the damaging impression upon many people that this is the exclusive possession of the Arabs – by not telling its story.
And people are going to side with those whose weapons are truth and justice, not diplomats mumbling about how Israel’s interests are only security and peace.
No one wants to hear a lawyer, who to most people, is the next thing to a used car salesman. Above all, Israel needs to reverse Oslo wholesale if it wants to survive.
although this is good it is long over do and not enough. This same argument should be practiced in actuality by the PM and FM in its dealings with foreign govs and the UN. the example must be set at the top. BB has been a remiss slacker in this regard as he has had over 2 terms without mentioning the legality and legitimacy of Jewish settlement in all the land of Israel, especially YS.
First, all foreign diplomats should be officially appraised of this position, and the position of the state should be that referring to Jewish settlement as illegal or illegitimate is considered to be not only a racist anti semitic insult but a libel, a lie.
Second, all those govs who signed up to the LON mandate should be summoned and told that their references to illegality and illegitimacy directly conflict with, and obstruct, their signed agreements and declarations to “facilitate Jewish immigration and encourage Jewish settlement in all of the mandate”.
Third, the same signatory and guaranteeing nations should be requested or demanded to change their overt policies to coincide with their signed obligations.
Fourth, lawfare should be initiated in the various individual nations which attacks these breaches of treaties and agreements and seeks estoppel and mandamus to reverse the damage.
Fifth, whether israel seeks to claim YS or not, as the occupying and administrative power over YS, it has a legal obligation to settle Jews in YS in accordance with the mandate. As such, it should begin a massive settlement enterprise like the US Homestead act of the 1800’s in order to mitigate past obstruction and damage to international jewry’s rights of settlement in YS by britain, jordan and Israel. This would be an affirmative action program designed to account for, and reverse, past damage to Jewry.
Training a few cadets is nice symbolism but the past damage done to Jewry by the silence, inaction and perceived self interest of the israeli state requires at the very minimum that the GOI internalize this same principle of legitimacy and legality of Jewish settlement in YS in its dealings of state. If not it is just one more bit of bullshiite to keep jews occupied with trivia.
In other words PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH AND TEACH the cadets.