A Hebrew media source claims that Israel’s Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, is planning to launch an international campaign against Saudi Arabia. The leader of the extreme right-wing Yisrael Beitenu party believes that “Saudi Arabia is behind the hostile campaign that Israel encounters on the international scene”.
According to the report, in the online version of Maariv, Lieberman has decided to launch this campaign because Saudi Arabia “finances a large number of legal cases and conferences against Israel’s position that take place in Europe and the United States”.
If Lieberman’s campaign goes ahead, the newspaper says, Israel will demand that the US and Europe put pressure on Riyadh to change its policy on human rights, women’s status and the “financing of terrorism”. One analyst in London commented that “it is a bit rich for someone like Lieberman – who espouses the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land – to lecture anyone else about respect for human rights”.