The Boycott National Committee (BNC) has targeted former Palestinian Authority minister, the billionaire Munib Al-Masri with criticism, after it emerged he had met with Israeli supermarket owner Rami Levy to discuss the Arab League’s 2002 Peace Initiative.
Masri’s reported meeting with the businessman was intended to rally Israeli support for the Arab League-sponsored initiative “from outside the peace camp”, which Masri claimed has little “influence on Israeli public opinion or developments inside Israel.”
However the BNC objected to the setting of the meeting inside one of Levy’s West Bank Etzion bloc supermarkets, which have themselves been subject to a BNC boycott.
A BNC statement described the contact between individuals from the two at-odds camps as “among the worst kinds of normalisation”, in a statement, adding that “it gives the occupation-state a fig leaf with which to cover its continued occupation, ethnic cleansing, and racism”.
The BNC also disputed the Arab League’s mandate to negotiate a peace initiative on the behalf of Palestinians, insisting the very terms it proposed eliminated the Palestinian “right of return” to Jewish State lines by disregarding the rights of Arab Israelis and called on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to demand an end to meetings between Masri and Levy.
Israel returned fire in the ongoing media-staged battle between the two sides by distributing a Strategic Affairs Ministry report to Israeli journalists Sunday that accused the PA of “incitement to hate, promotion of an ethos of violence and struggle, and non-development of a culture of peace”.
The document concluded that by demonising the Jewish State and nation, the PA itself provided the main obstacle to continued efforts to reignite the Middle East Peace Process. The timing of the report, which has been in progress since October 2009, is likely to be seen as deliberate given similar recent pronouncements by the Palestinian administration of Israel deliberately obstructing the peace process through its settlement activity.
Citing that the only true path to peace is through direct negotiations, which Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has refused to enter into whilst Israel pursues its settlement policies, the report claims that under PA guidelines “all forms of resistance remain legitimate”. Entitled “Index of Incitement”, it quotes alleged references by Abbas to “attacks by settlers which find expression in the uprooting of trees, burning of mosques, training dogs to attack us and sending wild pigs to destroy our lands”.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heralded the report for helping to identify “who we are dealing with, who cooperates with and initiates this awful incitement”, adding that “the Palestinian leadership is bequeathing this incitement to the coming generations and is preventing them from holding a dialogue of peace, the result of which is that it itself is incapable of adopting a dialogue of peace”.
Netanyahu concluded that the root of the continued conflict between the two sides was “the refusal of the Palestinians to recognise the national state of the Jewish People’s right to exist”, manifested in the widely-believed reports that Abbas will controversially appeal to the forthcoming UN General Assembly for Palestinian non-member status, as part of his plans for a unilateral declaration of statehood