By the time the Prime Ministers of Spain and Belgium, Pedro Sanchez and Alexander de Croo, concluded their two-day mission to Israel, the West Bank and Egypt today, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was beside himself. After the two held a final press conference on the Egyptian side of the Rafah Crossing to Gaza, shortly before the first Israeli hostages were to be released through that crossing, Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen summoned in the ambassadors of Spain and Belgium, to protest the “false claims” made by their Prime Ministers that “give terrorism a boost.” Netanyahu “strongly condemns the remarks made by the Belgian and Spanish Prime Ministers,” his office reported, charging them with not placing the responsibility for the commission of crimes against humanity against Hamas, which uses the Palestinians as human shields.
The message delivered by the two leaders at the Rafah Crossing was by and large the same that they had given to Netanyahu himself, when they met at the Knesset the day before, albeit in a less strident tone: the killing of civilians must end, and now. Netanyahu had responded to the two with a lecture on how, if the “barbarians” are not “eradicated,” they will take over the world. “History does not favor Jesus Christ over Genghis Khan. History favors the strong. Your moral values do not stand up if you’re not willing to fight for them,” he raved. (He claimed this to be the message of American historian Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization.)
The prime ministers’ publicly-available speeches demonstrate that the Netanyahu government’s charge that they did not denounce Hamas’s war crimes is a lie. Reflecting the broader shift developing internationally, Sanchez and De Croo did not back down, as others have, in the face of such lies.
Sanchez’s insistence, at Rafah, that there is no military solution to this crisis, only one of internationally-fostered dialogue, is reported elsewhere by this news service.
