Israeli venture capitalist and former Knesset member Erel Mergalit participated in a conference in Doha a couple of weeks ago entitled “Enriching the Middle East’s Economic Future Conference.” It appears that he even spoke there:
He posted this photo:
The person on the right of the photo, seemingly oblivious to the Jew next to him, is Rafiq Abdel Salam Al-Kaidi of the Ennahda (Muslim Brotherhood) Movement in Tunisia and brother-in-law of that movement’s leader in Tunisia.
Now he is in hot water for “normalizing” relations with Israel.
Brotherhood members in Tunisia are angry at al-Kaidi and investigating his crime of sitting next to an Israeli. the leadership said that he attended the conference in a personal capacity, not as a representative of the group, and he didn’t check out whether any hated Zionists would be attending.
The Brotherhood tried to downplay this, saying that he didn’t know who he was sitting next to.
Well-informed sources in the Tunisian Ennahda movement said that they would have an internal inquiry into the matter. Knowingly attending a conference with a Zionist would represent a departure from “the principles and positions of the movement.”
The Ninth Conference of the Ennahda Movement held in July 2012 stressed the need for what it called “criminalization of normalization,” saying that that the Palestinian issue “remains a central issue of the nation.”
But from Margalit’s photos, it looks like another enemy of Israel attended the conference where he spoke. He took this shot of the place-card of an Iranian attendee.
Any way you look at it, Israel is indeed becoming slowly more and more accepted at conferences like these. And the people screaming about it look more and more like idiots.
When mainstream Arabs are more accepting of Israel’s existence in public, and cooperating more closely with Israel in private, the BDS movement must be panicking. After all, how can they complain about British rock stars visiting Israel when the Arab world itself is happily accepting Israel’s help?
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