The Reason the Letter Became Public

JPost has the dirt on why the OU letter (again, full letter here) to senior Israeli officials, as discussed yesterday, was first leaked to the press and then posted publicly. The OU takes the matter very seriously and, once they did not receive any official response from the Israeli government after a reasonable period of time, they decided to make it public and increase the pressure on the government to respond.

TTC has a good observation: if you don't think your organization should be involved in the affairs of a foreign government, why should that government care about what you think of their handling of their internal affairs even if it does relate to civil liberties?

But the point is that the OU does have a presence in Israel, too, it does represent tens of thousands of American Jews, synagogues etc, has a long and prestigious history, and should not be taken lightly.

The point stands, no matter who makes it: what's going on in Israel and some of the actions that are being carried out by the Israeli authorities in the days and weeks ahead of the disengagement is simply unacceptable and it must stop.