Arutz Sheva spoke with David Bedein, Director of the Bedein Center for Near East Policy Research, about the ICC decision regarding Israel.

Bedein said he was “not at all surprised” by the decision.

“This is another step in the strategy of the Israel Left, of the Israel ‘human rights community’ that works with terror groups, to present Israel as a terror state and illegitimate, and to put a human rights umbrella around it. This is the problem.

“They have been doing this since 1989 when the PLO could not come to the US, so they changed their name to the Palestine Human Rights Information Center. How convenient - to present a terror organization as if it cares about human rights.

“This is the issue we’re facing. This should have been called B’Tselem Hague, not anything else.”

Describing his work with Israeli officials to counter such activities, Bedein said “I asked several times, including last week why the government of Israel doesn’t respond in real time on every report that comes out which has a very clear derogatory context about Israel. I got no answer - I never get an answer. Because the government of Israel since 1989 has not really answered these questions.”

Bedein related an experience he had while at the British parliament in London, during which he was barred from a meeting for being a “settler” who “poisons the wells of the Arabs as a matter of course.”

Later, he said, he came back to Israel and discovered there are “13 different organizations that spread the rumor that Israel poisons wells.”

“This is the kind of thing that Israel has to be responding to.”

Bedein proposed that the Israeli government could “establish a watch organization to respond in real time to every derogatory report that comes out about Israel, even within Israel, about any aspect of what Israel is doing. It doesn’t do that.”

He suggested the possibility that some people in the Israeli government “actually identify with those who want to get rid of the Jews in Judea and Samaria and those who really don’t mind derogatory criticism of Israel.”