Moving to Israel

As concerns have grown regarding the new American leadership with regards towards their policies with Israel, there has been at least one encouraging piece of news. The U.S. has anounced that it will be boycotting the Durban II conference on racism unless there are significant changes to what the State Department called “unsalvageable” anti-Israeli resolutions. Israel has been concerned by the new American government’s change in policy to participate in preliminary committee meetings for the convention, which is to be held in Geneva but bears the name of the South African city where the first meeting was held in 2001. The United States walked out of it because of harsh anti-Israeli resolutions.

With the conference planning a clearly anti-Israel agenda the State Department announcement came after growing domestic protests of the Obama administration’s participation in the planning committee.

While it is still too soon to see how the new administration will be working with Israel in the long term, this is a piece of good, encouraging news to let Israelis know that, at least for the moment, America still understands the amount of vitriol that that the world is armed with towards their best friends in the Middle East. Let’s hope this is a sign of things to come for the next four years.

 Ari