This year’s “Spring Offensive” — the annual global cavalcade of anti-Israel demonstrations and events — is likely to finish up bloody.
It began earlier this month with “Apartheid week,” the worldwide close-of-winter campus ritual that likens Zionism to one of history’s most evil regimes. These days it all promotes the “boycott-divest-sanction” strategy against Israel.
(BDS is little different from the post-1948 Arab boycott that tried to choke the newborn country. Happily, Israel’s economy is roaring while the Arabs lag behind — though the 65-year old “boycott” institutions are still there, headquartered in Damascus.)
It continued at the United Nations this week with the Human Rights Council’s passage of resolutions condemning Israel, the only country permanently on the body’s agenda. This year, the Geneva-based council outdid itself: A group affiliated with the genocidal regime of Sudan invited Ismail Al-Ashqar, an official of the terrorist group Hamas, to testify on Israel’s human-rights record.
The five knee-jerk resolutions passed Thursday include an innovation: a “fact-finding” probe of West Bank settlements. Dominated by tyrannies, the Human Rights Council readily passes such motions, promising kangaroo-court findings a la the infamous 2009 Goldstone report.
Yet the most ominous Spring Offensive event comes next week, with the Global March on Jerusalem planned for March 30. Supposedly, this is to consist of peaceful marchers to and across the Israeli border.
The idea is to get wide-eyed believers from across the Muslim ummah, and non-Muslim sympathizers, to “nonviolently” end Israel’s control of Jerusalem and its “campaign of Judaisation” of the city (where Jews have lived for thousands of years).
The march is sponsored by the likes of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and notorious British-friend-to-Arab-dictators George Galloway as well as South African Bishop Desmond Tutu.
But sinister players lurk behind these Western “idealists” — namely, Iran and its terror proxies.
After Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei publicly expressed his support for the March last month, Iran established local committees to help organize it. In London, the Iranian-backed Islamic Centre of England is one of the top European organizers of the event.
According to Fars, the Iranian news agency, Asian participants in the march arrived in Tehran this week. From there, they’ll go via Turkey to the Lebanese-Israeli border. The Iranian offshoot Hezbollah and other Lebanese allies are expected to take care of the rest.
The Tel Aviv-based Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has detailed Iran’s ties to the March on Jerusalem. It says Tehran’s goal is to exploit “the sensitivity of the Arab-Muslim world to the issue of Jerusalem, to draw international attention away from itself, and to broaden and deepen the delegitimization campaign being waged against Israel by channeling it to Iran’s own political needs.”
It may succeed — as long as some of the thousands of “protesters” trying to cross the border (from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Gaza) feel suicidal enough to go all the way.
Yes, the Israeli Defense Force developed non-lethal means to defend the country’s borders. But as Iran and its allies have learned from recent experience, persistent protesters can easily turn a “nonviolent” confrontation intoabloody event that will grab worldwide headlines.
At the very least, the organizers can hope that the inevitable condemnations of Israel will distract attention away from Iran’s nuclear advances and/or Syria’s murderous suppression of dissent.
After all, as the whole Spring Offensive phenomenon shows, there’s now a worldwide movement — with not just Arabs and Muslims but also Europeans, Americans and even Israeli leftists — ready to buy the distorted picture of the Jewish state, founded as self-reliant refuge for last century’s victims, as this century’s worst predator.
Twitter: @bennyavni