I just finished watching a news broadcast. As usual, it left me amaze at how ignorant so many so-called world leaders are.
There is a movement afoot to ban Israel from the Eurovision song contest. Spain’s prime minister said they won’t participate if Israel does. He said Russia was banned for invading Ukraine, but when Israel attacks Gaza nothing is done. It’s bad enough to be grouped with Putin, but overlooking the difference between Russia as an aggressor and Israel as a victim is beyond belief.
One commentator made an impassioned plea for halting economic tie with west bank “settlements”. I don’t have any idea how that could be done in practice. She probably doesn’t either. But that’s the way feelings seem to be running in Europe now. She called the “settlements” illegal, based on a Universal Court of Justice advisory opinion. That opinion (not a judgement) has been used to reinforce the claim that the 1967 cease-fire lines were a real border. This is despite the fact that those agreements specifically say that a real border will have to be negotiated between the parties. It also is used to support Arab accusations that Jews are an “occupying power”. Nobody apparently considered that the original League of Nations Mandate reserved all that territory for a future Jewish state. The Arabs still talk about Zionists as if they are all European colonizers. No one remembers that in 1949 when UNRWA recorded 750,000 “Arab” refuges base on them having lived in Palestine at some point during the last 2 years, the existence of over 850,000 Jewish refugees who fled from Arab countries (and whose property was confiscated by the Arab governments!) was ignored. Their roots went back more than a thousand years, and also formed the source of a regular, albeit not large, flow of Jewish immigration into Turkish ruled Palestine for centuries. Incidentally, the Arabs rejected the idea that the 1967 line was a border at the time. They wanted, and still want, control over the entire land.
There was just an Arab/Muslim summit meeting to discuss the attack in Doha. They, too, failed to come up with any ideas for concrete action. They did talk about a Hamas readiness to resume negotiations, but everyone knows that is just a ploy for keeping world attention focused on Gaza where they still control what media reporters write and film.
Wetherhorn 