“Peres suddenly pinned me to the door and tried to kiss me,” said MK Colette Avital. “When I left, my legs were shaking. I was repulsed.”

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

Shimon Peres, former prime minister and president of Israel who was one of the nation’s most storied statesmen, repeatedly sexually harassed former Labor MK Colette Avital, she revealed during a bombshell interview on Thursday with Hebrew language daily Haaretz.

While stationed in Paris while on a diplomatic assignment from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the 1980s, Avital said that Peres invited her to his hotel room to discuss an urgent security matter.

The supposed emergency was really just a pretence to pressure her into sex, Avital told Haaretz.

Upon arrival, she was surprised to find Peres clad only in his pajamas. He then tried to physically push her onto the bed, but she left the room.

She told Peres’ advisor, Yossi Beilin, who later served as a minister in his government, about the incident.

“I told him: ‘The next time Peres arrives in Paris, I will not be left alone with him. You will be with me,’’ Avital recalled.

At the time, Peres was head of the opposition in the Knesset.

Initially, Avital believed the incident was a one-off event, but he sexually harassed her again a few years later.

After returning to Israel from her assignment in Paris in 1984, Avital was called for an interview with Peres for the position of his communications director. Peres was then the prime minister of Israel.

Avital told Haaretz that the interview had been uneventful, until she tried to leave the meeting room.

“He suddenly pinned me to the door and tried to kiss me,” she said. “When I left, my legs were shaking. I was repulsed.”

She added that just minutes before, Peres had expressed reservations about hiring a woman and said he was worried what people would say if he chose a female for the position.

Beilin told Ynet that he had no recollection of the Paris incident.

“I do not remember such an event and I certainly was not exposed to such behavior from Peres,” he said.

“I was very surprised by this interview. I am also not in a position to deny things, because I do not remember.”

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Such behavior violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Civil Servants’ Code of Ethics, says NGO Mattot Arim.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

An Israeli NGO demanded Tuesday that the foreign minister cut all ties to former diplomats who use their titles to get publicity abroad for anti-government agendas, thereby blackening Israel’s name.

A Facebook post last month by Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi caught the eye of Zionist group Mattot Arim. The minister wrote that he had met with veterans of his ministry to hear their suggestions and learn from their “rich experience.”

He told them, “I see you as diplomats who have been drafted as reservists to serve the country.”

NGO spokesperson Susie Dym warned Ashkenazi that some of these retirees are not defending the state.

“We would like to draw your attention to an ugly phenomenon in which veterans of the foreign ministry, including diplomats and very senior personnel, publicly promote diplomatic attacks against the State of Israel,” Dym wrote to Ashkenazi.

Dym pointed to letters published abroad over the past five years in which senior former ambassadors used their titles in an effort to influence European governments and the American Democratic party to act against official Israeli policy, with which they disagreed.  The most recent example occurred just weeks before Ashkenazi met the group that he praised on Facebook.

Using their titles as “former Israeli ambassadors,” Colette Avital, former Israeli consul-general New York, and Ilan Baruch, former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe, wrote a letter published in May in the Irish Times urging Dublin to enact an anti-Israel bill “to challenge the incoming Government of Israel’s ominous plans for annexation…and protect the two-state solution.”

Overtly contradicting Jerusalem’s policy backed by the United States that settlements are not illegal, they also echoed specious claims made by countries antagonistic to Israel that “annexation…runs the risk of turning Israel into an apartheid state.”

The NGO demanded that Ashkenazi consider such behavior as violating the Civil Servants’ Code of Ethics and stop meeting former foreign ministry personnel who act against Israel’s interests.

World Israel News asked Dym how former employees could violate a code of ethics that applies to active personnel.

“The code requires civil servants to ‘refrain from taking action which does harm to the State of Israel’ and requires them to ‘honor the branches of government,’” she responded. “This applies even to low-level and low-visibility civil servants. It certainly applies to people who identify themselves as former ambassadors, using their former status to bolster their Israel-bashing activities which include urging foreign elements to sanction the State of Israel.”

“A Code of Ethics can and should apply to retirees, mostly if they are senior retirees with public visibility,” Dym said. “For example, the State of Israel’s Code of Ethics for judges states that ‘it is appropriate for a retired judge to continually keep in mind the spirit of’ the Code of Ethics’ and that he should ‘direct his behavior and deportment accordingly.’ Ambassadors should be no different.”

Dym said that Mattot Arim is not asking Ashkenazi to initiate legal action against such diplomats, as a democracy should not limit anyone’s freedom of speech.

However, “We are saying that the minister should tell the retired diplomatic community off in no uncertain terms and insist, firmly but informally, that such behavior must stop,” she explained. “If the retired diplomatic community insists on continuing to tolerate this behavior in their midst, the foreign minister should then refuse to accept their informal advice or meet with them.

“The question of whom a minister should look to for advice and counsel is an informal matter which is subject to ministerial discretion. So the minister should protect Israel’s reputation by not taking advice from anyone who disrespectfully bites the hand that fed them in the past.”

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has yet to respond to Mattot Arim’s letter.

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Former Israeli diplomats who recently endorsed European boycott of Judea and Samaria now urging Democratic Party to pressure Israel.

By World Israel News Staff

A group of left-leaning former Knesset members and Israeli diplomats, in a letter sent Friday to the Democratic Party’s platform drafting committee, urged them to reject the Trump peace plan and any idea of Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria, Times of Israel reported Sunday.

The letter was signed by 27 Israelis, whose names mostly match those on a letter in June to the Irish government in support of a bill that would force Irish entities to boycott Israeli companies based in Judea and Samaria, echoing arguments normally heard from Israel’s enemies.

Last week, the Democratic National Committee released a draft of the party’s election platform for the upcoming November elections in which the party added new language that opposes Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria and specifically says the Democrats support Palestinian rights.

It didn’t go far enough for these former members of Israel’s diplomatic corps.

Signatories to the letter include former left-wing Meretz Party leader Zehava Galon; former Israeli consul general in New York Colette Avital; Baruch Binah, former deputy head of mission to the Israeli embassy in Washington, and several other former members of Knesset and senior diplomats.

“We are reaching out to our friends in the Democratic Party to ask that you ensure that the party’s platform explicitly rejects Israel’s occupation over the Palestinian people, the Trump plan, and the annexation of any part of the occupied territories,” the former officials wrote.

“We call upon you to voice your support for the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel with Jerusalem as a shared capital, and with both peoples living in peace and security,” they added.

The draft Democratic platform disappointed progressives in the party by not mentioning “the occupation” – a politically loaded term used by those who oppose Israel’s presence in Judea and Samaria.

The Democratic party platform is expected to be finalized at the Democratic National Convention, scheduled to open in Milwaukee on August 17.

The draft platform rejects Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to apply Israeli sovereignty to some settlement areas in Judea and Samaria, reiterates support for the two-state solution, and calls for a return to the Iran nuclear deal, which President Trump pulled out of in 2018.

Although Netanyahu pledged to start the sovereignty process July 1, the idea has apparently been put on hold due to hesitation on the part of the Trump Administration over the details combined with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and civil unrest related to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Biden and Netanyahu have had what both call a long friendship, although the Democratic presidential candidate is on the record as being opposed to any unilateral Israeli imposition of sovereignty while at the same time supporting the long-term aid package agreed to during the Obama administration.

Although Biden told Jewish donors in May that he would “reverse the Trump administration’s steps that I think significantly undercut the prospects of peace,” he also said he would leave the American embassy in Jerusalem. In 2018, Trump moved the embassy from Tel Aviv to the Israeli capital.

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