Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s bristly reaction to last month’s EU decision to label products exported from Israeli-held territory over the Green Line is having repercussions in the diplomatic arena.
Austrian Vice Chancellor Reinhold Mitterlehner canceled a planned visit to Israel when his host, Science, Technology and Space Minister Ofir Akunis, insisted on receiving him at the ministry’s East Jerusalem offices.
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Late last month, Netanyahu himself cancelled a meeting with the Belgian foreign minister, Didier Reynders, because of Brussels’ support for the labeling initiative.
Reynders visit, to Israel and Palestine, was slated for December 5 to 8 and has been “indefinitely postponed.”
Matters are not much sunnier on the American front. Netanyahu and US Secretary of State John Kerry engaged in a pique-filled exchange [2]over the weekend, differing radically in their assessments of the viability of the Israeli-Palestinian security situation.
According to the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, the Obama administration has reached the conclusion shared by many centrist Israelis, that “the Israeli government is living in a parallel universe that is drifting apart” from the US.