ANNOUNCEMENT: in response to the declaration of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Last week the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Spain, Germany, France, and Italy made a joint statement that alarms us for being extemporaneous and unjust. It seems as if once more Israel is used to divert our attention from our serious domestic problems, identifying guilty parts of foreign conflicts from the most pitiful simplification. It looks as if they are pretending to have a common orientation in matters of foreign policy that in reality Europe lacks in a very complex international context. As complex as to provoke deep discrepancies between Germany and France, whose alliance is foundational in the European Union, since the war in Ukraine began to fill the world with uncertainty.

The statement insists on calling disputed territories “occupied territories”, and gratuitously includes East Jerusalem in them; it underlines the “violence practised by the settlers” and no other violence, as if the continuous terrorist attacks against the security of Israel did not exist; it advocates “the two-state solution”, omitting the fact that when such a solution was obtainable it was the Palestinian representatives, plus the different historical enemies of Israel, who blocked it by all means. A trend that goes back to the military attack of all its neighbours at the same time the very same day that the home of the Jews proclaimed its independence.

A minimum amount of shame and a basic knowledge of their own history should prevent the signatories from using Israel time and time again as a joker, the eternal propitiatory victim. Here again, like in a recurring nightmare, is the favourite scapegoat of the continent. Today it presents itself under the hardly disguised form of the renewed prejudice, of the diversion of blame, of the whitewashing of terrorism, of its indirect financing and, at the same time, of the use of a special severity, of a different measure when judging the small state where so many European survivors of the atrocity went to live. With so many ghosts of the twentieth century in their closets, at least three of the signatory countries should be more careful. It is not about not evaluating dangers: it is about not lying, not choosing systematically the facts and words that most can harm Israel and omit, more or less constantly, that which is capable of removing the disguise from the Palestinian groups and the European states of the same old hemiplegic song of solidarity.