Israel losing public relations battle in West: Activist

Press TV has interviewed Paul Larudee, co-founder of Free Palestine Movement in Berkeley, about Germany beginning to re-examine its decades-long policy of unconditional support for Israel in the face of Tel Aviv's expansionist policy in the occupied West Bank. 

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.                                     

Press TV: As we are seeing these reports of Germany re-examining its policy of unconditional support for Israel, how far is that going to go?

Larudee: If history is our measure it is not going to go very far. We deserve to be skeptical about the intentions of governments. Usually what governments do is cosmetic and there is a different policy altogether behind what we see.

In this particular case, every government needs to show some criticism of Israel from time to time, their constituency is demanded, they want to try to make themselves credible but in terms of actual implementation and in terms of funding and relationships and so forth, I am afraid that very little will change.

I mean it is not a bad thing that Merkel is criticizing Netanyahu and saying that these negotiations are going nowhere and that Netanyahu is not being serious about intentions towards a settlement but nobody is serious about a settlement. There has not been any serious effort towards a settlement of this conflict for decades.

So let’s be realistic about our expectations and in this case there is nothing to indicate that Germany is actually going to seriously change its policies.  

Press TV: And of course there is though that movement that we are seeing across Europe as well as in different parts of the world where people are slowly waking up to the reality on the ground when it comes to Palestine, when it comes to Israel’s illegal settlement buildings specifically when you look at the BDS movement. Do you think that at least if only in words this recent move by the German government is a reflection of that?   

Larudee: There is something of a general trend, even the Israeli ... [regime] is facing that that Israel is less and less popular, it is less considered as a benign actor on the global scene and more as a belligerent one, as a racist one. This is happening and I think in spite of the fact that the budgets for countering these impressions through public relations and so forth that Israel is spending mountains of money to try to influence public opinion in the West, in spite of all of that I think they are convinced that they are going to lose the public relations battle and that more people are going to think of Israel more as a pariah than as a friend.

And for that reason I think that the actions of Netanyahu and the points that were made by your previous guest about the slaughtering of young children, the imprisoning of children and so forth, all of these things are going to accelerate because Israel is trying to achieve its ends of the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestine as quickly as possible before it loses its opportunity to do that.

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