This was enough for President Shimon Peres to get involved and write a letter to the Council’s secretary-general, Thorbjorn Jagland, asking him to clarify their position. Jagland patiently replied that the resolution had no legal meaning beyond a general advisory capacity, that the assembly “does not represent the position of the Council of Europe as a whole” and that “nothing in the body of our legally binding standards would lead us to put on equal footing the issue of female genital mutilation and the circumcision of young boys for religious reasons.”

In a normal country, this is where the saga would have ended.

One of the more active speakers at the meeting was Shas MK Nissim Zeev, himself a mohel (a man who professionally conducts circumcisions). Ostensibly an expert on the issue, Zeev was convicted twelve years ago of malpractice after he caused irreversible damage to a baby in a brit milah gone awry. The case got as far as the Supreme Court because Zeev refused to recognize his responsibility and compensate the parents (he was ultimately fined NIS 750,000). Not only did he remain unrepentant, he continued conducting circumcisions without any intervention from the authorities – and on Monday went on to decry the European resolution, presumably because an invisible-hand policy on the matter had served him so well.

But it was committee chairman MK Yoel Razbozov (Yesh Atid) who trumped his peers and effortlessly clinched the prize for hubristic excess. If Jewish ritual circumcision is forbidden in Europe, he said, “we will instruct embassies to hold circumcision ceremonies on their territory, which is Israeli sovereign territory.”

This statement is ridiculous on so many counts;

It also assumes that Israel would actively and openly encourage citizens of other countries to break the law and provide them with the means to do so, which is as conceivable as an Israeli decision to cut off diplomatic ties with those countries. He is wrong also on the basic points of international law – an embassy is not sovereign territory of the country it represents, it remains the territory of the host-nation. Embassies simply enjoy immunity from most local laws and the police or any other official representative cannot force an entry. If circumcision was indeed to become illegal in a certain country, the police would not be able to enter the local Israeli embassy and prevent a circumcision from taking place but the parents and mohel would still be breaking the law and liable for arrest upon exit.