Diplomatic tip: European Fee President Ursula von der Leyen will forgive and overlook your nation’s outrages and crimes and want you a cheerful birthday in return, apparently, for an honorary diploma. That quid professional quo was on blatant and telling display final week when von der Leyen took to social media to congratulate Israel on …
Diplomatic tip: European Fee President Ursula von der Leyen will forgive and overlook your nation’s outrages and crimes and want you a cheerful birthday in return, apparently, for an honorary diploma.
That quid professional quo was on blatant and telling display final week when von der Leyen took to social media to congratulate Israel on its seventy fifth birthday.
In lieu of a blue and white cake topped with 75 candles, von der Leyen posted an almost 90-second video airbrushing Israel’s lengthy, merciless historical past of theft and violence visited on generations of imprisoned Palestinians. She additionally praised the apartheid state for its “dynamism” and “ingenuity”.
“Seventy-five years in the past, a dream was realized,” she mentioned. “You [Israel] have actually made a desert bloom.”
Her crude revisionism and recycling of a well-known, bigoted trope was condemned immediately and loudly by Palestinians who haven’t solely endured the infinite nightmare of Israel’s ruthless occupation, however who’ve additionally been invaded, jailed, tortured, killed and had their properties and lands stolen by the dynamic and ingenious birthday boy celebrating Independence Day together with President von der Leyen.
On Tuesday, Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan was discovered useless in an Israeli jail after an almost three-month starvation strike towards his incarceration with out cost or trial. Don’t anticipate von der Leyen to utter a phrase about it. The birthday bash mustn’t be ruined.
Whereas her contentious feedback triggered a broad backlash, I remembered that von der Leyen had spouted this traditionally illiterate, revisionist tripe simply months earlier than when she was given a lofty prize at an occasion imbued with ego-soothing pageantry.
On June 14, a beaming von der Leyen was feted with an honorary doctorate from Ben-Gurion College of the Negev.
“Properly, how thrilling,” the college’s giddy president mentioned earlier than bestowing von der Leyen with the symbolic honour, which was a mirrored image partially, he added, of their “distinctive” visitor’s “long-term dedication to ladies’s rights”.
Von der Leyen sat within the centre of a raised dais, smiling as a brief movie tracing her accomplishments and applauding her dedication to selling ladies’s pursuits and equality was proven to the scholars, college and diplomats gathered in a spherical corridor.
Solely weeks earlier, veteran Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh was fatally shot within the head by an Israeli sniper whereas overlaying yet one more early morning raid within the Jenin refugee camp by eager-to-harm troopers.
Nonetheless, von der Leyen couldn’t resist travelling to Israel to get her sash and scroll.
In her effusive 22-minute speech in June, von der Leyen gave extra fulsome expression to her blind, unqualified help and affection for Israel.
“I really feel honoured and humbled to obtain this recognition,” she mentioned. “It looks as if a miracle {that a} German like me is welcomed and honoured right here within the state of Israel as a pal amongst pals.”
For sure, von der Leyen didn’t point out Abu Akleh’s identify – if she remembered it in any respect. Nor did she handle, not to mention condemn, the homicide of a brave feminine journalist who had devoted her life and work to defending the rights and dignity of her sisters – Palestinian women and girls amongst so many others.
As an alternative, von der Leyen lauded a rogue nation that was not solely chargeable for Abu Akleh’s assassination but in addition the state-sanctioned brutality that Palestinian women and girls in blockaded Gaza, the occupied West Financial institution and Jerusalem have suffered yr after grinding yr.
It was a sorry efficiency by a preening politician extra fascinated by having her vainness stroked and absolving her hosts’ complicity and guilt than confronting Israel’s systemic violation of ladies and ladies whose trigger she claims to champion.
Von der Leyen’s at occasions hyperbolic acceptance speech veered into what can solely be described because the surreal.
“Europe is the values of the Talmud: the Jewish sense of non-public duty, of justice and of solidarity,” she mentioned.
It will come as a shock, I believe, to enlightened Europeans who proceed to oppose and denounce the failure of iron-fisted Israeli governments and too many obstinate Israelis to just accept any measure of duty for the litany of injustices the occupiers have compelled upon besieged Palestinians.
It will come as a shock, as properly, to the string of human rights teams inside and outdoors Israel who’ve concluded – as a matter of worldwide legislation – that the nation von der Leyen calls a “pal” has, since its inception, pursued a pitiless coverage of apartheid in direction of Palestinians. All with the sinister intent to impose its ethnic supremacy and to crush Palestinians into ghettos with deliberate, inhuman effectivity.
Von der Leyen didn’t dedicate a lot as a syllable to that egregious and exhaustively documented file. She most well-liked to site visitors in cussed, facts-on-the-ground-allergic rhetoric like this: “Israel is a vibrant democracy. Its resilience is admired worldwide. … Israel is a small slice of land the place individuals of all faiths and born on all continents stay collectively.”
Okey dokey.
In fact, von der Leyen singled out Russia for “its aggression” towards Ukraine’s territorial integrity with out bothering to notice that Israel has launched calamitous floor invasions of Gaza in late 2008 to early 2009 and in 2014 that obliterated properties, colleges, hospitals and livelihoods whereas killing, maiming and traumatising 1000’s of kids, ladies and men who had no place to cover.
The casualties included Palestinian Nobel Peace Prize nominee Izzeldin Abuelaish’s three daughters and their cousin who have been dismembered when two Israeli tank shells have been fired into their house as they huddled collectively on January 16, 2009.
It seems that von der Leyen has forgotten about these women and girls, too.
What she didn’t overlook to do was to trot out the odious chestnut that, currently, has brought on such an uproar.
“I marvel at how … you’ve got, fairly actually, made the desert bloom,” von der Leyen informed her appreciative viewers.
Past erasing the historical past and presence of Palestinians in that “desert” for hundreds of years, the clear and certainly, racist, implication is that the land was empty or uncared for previous to the arrival of Jewish settlers.
Once more, I’m satisfied that enlightened European parliamentarians and thousands and thousands of Europeans who aspect with the Palestinians’ simply combat will reject outright the president’s outrageous language and demand she retract her retrograde remarks.
Listening to each speeches, I used to be shocked not solely by a few of what von der Leyen mentioned however how she mentioned it.
The talks oozed with a grating, self-gratulatory high quality: the by-product of her evident and overarching goal to please relatively than to problem.
Then there was the smug certainty of von der Leyen’s gooey sentimentalism that betrays a profound misunderstanding of the flamable area and an obliviousness to the harm that her halting feedback have been certain to trigger to appalled Palestinians and their equally offended allies.
The European Fee’s president ought to, as a minimum, apologise. You and I do know she gained’t. A present-wrapped bauble, it appears, is extra necessary than the fixed struggles, capricious fates and endangered lives of Palestinians.
Disgrace on her.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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