Paul Calvert spoke with Yitzhak Santis from NGO Monitor

Paul: There are a lot of atrocities happening all over the Middle East, why did they only pick on Israel?

Yitzhak: It's this concerted, well-funded NGO network that is pushing the Palestinian nationalist agenda against Israel. They have targeted the churches for instance, deliberately trying to capture churches. The BDS movement, which is based in Ramallah, know that their message, if it comes from Palestinians, will be seen as a partisan message and will not get much traction, but if they are able to activate the churches and bring churches into this and create this false image of Israel using language such as Israel is an apartheid state and a racist state, using this demonising language and calling on the churches to participate on behalf of the BDS movement, then the churches are carrying the message of the BDS movement and suddenly it's not just the Palestinians, it's now the churches and they carry a great deal of moral weight in the West. There is a deliberate attempt to capture the churches to carry this anti-Israel message.

Paul: Is this another form of anti-Semitism?

Yitzhak: Yes and now you are getting into a very long discussion. Anti-Semitism has a very specific meaning. Is criticising Israel or criticising a policy or the Israeli government an anti-Semitic act? The answer is no, not in and by itself. The question is when you criticise Israel and you use anti-Jewish stereotypes, even if you just substitute the word Jew with the word Zionist, then you are crossing into anti-Semitic territory. If for instance you criticise the Israeli government for its polices and settlements on the West Bank that is not anti-Semitic; if however you say that Zionists control the media in the West and that's why we don't hear the full story, then that is an anti-Semitic statement. If you say that the Zionists control all the Banks and Zionists control this and Zionists control that, then all you are doing is just taking Hitler's Mein Kampf and instead of saying Jew you're just using the word Zionist and that is an act of anti-Semitism.

Paul: We are seeing a growing desire to boycott Israel. Is it actually possible to boycott Israel because Israel is ahead of everything in every field?

Yitzhak: If you really want to truly boycott Israel then you are going to have to shut off your cell phone and throw it away; you are going to have to shut down your computer because the chances are the Intel chips inside your computer were designed at the Intel factory in Israel. You would have to shut down Facebook, because it was founded by a Jew and if you truly want to boycott Israel, then there are probably all sorts of health items you are going to have to give up. If you have a stent in your heart and that has saved your life, then you are going to have to have it removed, because stents were, I believe, developed in Israel originally. Israel is at the forefront of high tech and innovation and if you truly want to boycott Israel then you are going to have to go back to the 19th century just about.

Paul: Do you think Israel is being held to another standard that others aren't held to?

Yitzhak: There is no question that there is a double standard being used against Israel. At the United Nations Human Rights Council, Israel is the only country out of 192 or so nation states that has a permanent item on the agenda, where Israel's human rights record is visited every single session. Israel is the only country that is excluded from sitting on the Human Rights Council although countries like Libya, Iran or Russia, with its wonderful human rights record all sit on the Human Rights Council and Saudi Arabia is on the Human Rights Council for goodness sake. There is a huge double standard there. Israel more than any other country is criticised and attacked and condemned by the United Nations General Assembly. It's all politics: the General Assembly is not a non-partisan body, it is a political body and the United Nations General Assembly runs by politics and you have 57 countries that are members of the organisation of Islamic countries, 22 Arab states and plus any number of so called non-aligned countries. They all vote as a block regularly against Israel, regardless of the human rights records of some of these countries, which are absolutely horrendous and also non-democratic countries. Iran sits on the Human Rights Council I believe - Iran, which is a non-democratic country that has one of the highest execution rates in the world and executes gay and lesbian people just for their lifestyle. They persecute non-Muslim minorities and there is never upper censure at the United Nations Human Rights Council, so is there a double standard against Israel? Absolutely.

Paul: Do you feel that some of these groups have hijacked words such as racist and apartheid?

Yitzhak: It's all part of the de-legitimisation effort. In looking at how best to de-legitimise Israel, then to apply to it words like apartheid, racist, or Zionism, is just like Nazism. All of this you hear all the time by the anti-Israel crowd and the whole purpose is to de-legitimise Israel. If you can create the image of the state of Israel as being equivalent as Nazi Germany or apartheid era South Africa, if you can succeed in doing that, then you have succeeded in putting Israel outside of the realm of a legitimate state for existence and that is the goal. Those who fall for it are either ignorant or wilfully malevolent in their belief towards Israel or toward Jews or all the above. When I think that when you look at Israel, when you come here and you live here in a democratic multi-cultural society in which the citizens enjoy more individual rights than any other country in the Middle East; where the Arab citizens of Israel enjoy more civil rights than any other Arab population anywhere in the Arab world, it is really difficult to square that circle that Israel is somehow this totalitarian Nazi like state. It's absurd.

Paul: Christian groups like the Holy Land Trust and the Amos Trust are non-violent, but they are very one-sided, do you think that promotes anger and hatred?

Yitzhak Santis

Yitzhak: You know when I meet with Christians on the topic of Israel and the Palestinians and I ask them what they want, the answer is usually, "We want peace"; "We want the Israelis and Palestinians to stop fighting and to end the conflict and stop the suffering". I completely agree with that. Nobody wants peace more than I do. I have to say that what happens though, when Christian groups, Church, or Christian Aid Society's start to take up the de-legitimisation campaign and support boycott divestment and sanctions and support the isolation of Israel, then they are no longer being peacemakers. What they have done is join the conflict and they have actually become partisans in the conflict and taken sides. A true peacemaker does not take sides. A true peacemaker speaks truth to both sides. A true peacemaker tries to bring both sides together. The boycott, divestment, sanctions movement does not want to bring both sides together. Boycott, divestment and sanctions, BDS, seeks to undermine Israel's existence and to end Israel's right to exist. If churches start taking that position, that the Jewish state has no right to exist, then they become partisans in the conflict and even worse, after 60 years of a flowering Jewish and Christian relationship after the holocaust, for churches to start advocating against Israel's right to exist puts them back to the pre 1945 situation where the churches regularly vilified Jews; because what they are saying is that the Jewish people of all the peoples in the world, the Jewish people don't have a right to a national and sovereign equality.

Paul: When churches or Christian organisations try to de-legitimise Israel, they have adopted a replacement theology haven't they?

Yitzhak: You know some of the arguments that are used by Sabeel, the Palestinian Christian Liberation Theology Centre are indeed replacement theology. The argument and here I am getting on to theology, so I am on shaky ground as I am not a theologian, but the argument that Jesus fulfilled all the promises of the Old Testament of the Jewish Bible and that includes the promise of land and therefore modern Jews don't have a right historically or religiously to any part of the land of Israel, the Holy Land; that is something that theologically creates more conflict, but also what they are doing, they are using theology and putting it to the service of the Palestinian Nationalist cause. So on the one hand Christianity is a universal religion and then using the universal theology for a particularistic cause is inherently contradictory.