Support, Conditional

M.K. Bhadrakumar

Call them pests or pushers—or simply Rottweilers—the Israeli diplomats have gained notoriety over time as a unique breed in the international circuit who have no time or patience for niceties or propriety when Tel Aviv instructs them to go for the jugular veins of the host country where they are assigned.

The threshold was set by none other than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when in 2015 he extracted from the lawmakers on the Hill in Washington an invitation to him to visit the US, bypassing the proper channel of President Barack Obama, and address a joint session of the Congress—which he proceeded to do with elan to undermine Obama’s negotiations with Tehran on the nuclear deal.

It was a blatant interference in the US’ political system. Netanyahu not only belittled Obama and showed that his clout with the power brokers in Washington was greater than the president’s but also dictated to the White House the US’ policy towards Iran. He got away with it because he estimated, rightly so, that the American political elites were in the payroll of the Israel lobby.

The above episode comes to mind seeing the media reports of remarks by the Israeli ambassador in New Delhi Naor Gilon who publicly demanded a shift in the Indian policy toward Palestine by banning Hamas as a ‘terrorist’ organisation.

Gilon is a career diplomat with a track record of almost 35 years and it is unlikely he was ignorant of propriety. Conceivably, Delhi stonewalled Gilon’s demarche on Hamas and he decided to take his battle to the entrenched Israel lobby in the Indian media.

These are times when Israeli diplomacy is desperately in need of a success story as the country’s reputation is in the mud