Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, spoke at the Arutz Sheva Israel Heritage Foundation Yom Yerushalayim celebration dinner, which was held in Manhattan.
Erdan recalled how, as Minister of Strategic Affairs, he led the fight against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
“We knew that the Palestinian Authority was behind the scenes, pulling the strings, but it wasn’t their formal policy. Today, the world has changed and their policy and their strategy have also changed.”
“Today, thank God, our enemies understand that they cannot defeat us on the conventional war field. They don’t have chance because the IDF is too powerful. So they decided upon a different strategy. That’s why we’ve seen the Nakba event taking place recently at the UN. They try to weaponize every international organization to delegitimize the whole notion of the Jewish state.”
Erdan noted that the Palestinian Arabs say that Jews are not part of the land of Israel. “[They say], ‘You are colonialists’. That’s what [Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas] said just a few days ago here in New York. He blamed the US and the UK not for supporting the two-state solution. He is blaming them for supporting the Balfour Declaration. When you don’t believe that the land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people, you cannot win a PR campaign when you don’t convince your own people, and also the rest of the world, that the land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel.”
The Ambassador also said that “the most effective tool that we have is Israel, because Israel sells itself. When you bring influential leaders to visit Israel, when you show them the connection between the Jewish people and the land of Israel, they understand.”
“We should think together, Israelis and Americans, how to reach out to new communities that are becoming more and more influential here in the United States,” continued Erdan. “We all understand that strategically Israel must maintain the bipartisan support for the State of Israel, and in order to maintain this bipartisan support, we need to invest in taking new community leaders, new influencers, to visit Israel, to visit Judea and Samaria, to visit Jerusalem and its holy sites, because what they’ve been hearing for the last 10-20 years are terrible things against the State of Israel.”