Jorge Dezcallar
Ambassador of Spain
As if we had not had enough with the low level of blows that our politicians exchange in the domestic arena, in recent days the atmosphere has become even more tense with two controversial decisions that the government has taken in the field of foreign relations.
The first concerns the recognition of the Palestinian state and the second concerns the president of the Argentine Republic.
Recognition of the Palestinian state was not supposed to be a matter of internal debate, as it has been defended by the two major parties PSOE and PP, which, as they cannot go without discussion, have decided to do so not in terms of the decision itself, but in terms of the moment chosen to take it. According to international law, the reality is that Palestine does not meet the necessary requirements to be a state: it does not have a defined population, its territory is occupied by another country and it certainly does not have a monopoly on the use of force over that population and territory.
The decision is therefore more symbolic than real, although it is not new either, as it has already been taken by 143 countries, including eleven European countries, although not the three with the greatest weight in the EU. But it is an important symbolism because it sends two very strong messages: one of support for the Palestinians, who need it because they have been suffering so much lately, and the other of punishment of Israel for taking its undisputed right to legitimate self-defence to intolerable extremes. And these messages are all the stronger for coming from the two European countries that have been most active in the search for a political solution to the 75-year-old conflict between Palestinians and Israelis: Norway, which promoted the Oslo Process, and Spain, which hosted the Middle East Peace Conference in Madrid, the only time Palestinians, Arabs and Israelis have sat at the same table.
Is it time to take a step that has annoyed Israel to the point of recalling its ambassadors in Madrid, Oslo and Dublin for consultations? The first thing to say is that, for Israel, which does not want to hear about a Palestinian state and which occupies more and more Palestinian land every day (settlements are rampant), there will never be an opportune moment to do so, and the second is that its government is currently under internal and external pressure (demonstrations demanding the release of the hostages and the resignation of the prime minister, the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court) and this is dangerous because a weak and harassed government tends to overreact in its response. But if the timing is not good for Israel, it is better for the Palestinians, who are having the worst time of their lives since the Nakba, the tragedy of the expulsion from their land when the United Nations created the state of Israel, and need to hear that they have the right to a state. What is not acceptable are the accusations of genocide by the Minister of Defence, or of genocide and a Palestine ‘from the river to the sea’ by an entire Vice-President of the Government, which reveal ignorance and sectarianism and are understood in Israel as favouring their physical disappearance. Someone should shut them up.
But the decision to recognise the Palestinian state seems right to me. We often complain about having a government so absorbed by internal problems that it does not occupy the place in Europe that befits a country that is the fourth largest economy in the Eurozone. This time we have done it with an ambition to lead and I am pleased about that because I am convinced that there will be no security for Israel, the only democracy in the whole of the Middle East, without justice for the Palestinians.
The other crisis is the one provoked by the Argentinian President, Mr Milei, who is rude, even though he too has previously received insults from our government. Insults give away the category of the person who is insulting. But withdrawing our ambassador seems to me to be a serious diplomatic error, a beginner’s mistake in foreign policy. Because the government has overreacted by putting its political interests before national interests (the King and Rajoy, among others, have also suffered insults before without recalling ambassadors) and because they have given Milei control of the crisis: one day -sooner rather than later- we will have to appoint another ambassador to Argentina and Milei will have to give him the go-ahead, and he will either give it or not give it or delay it for as long as he wants.
With his decision to withdraw our ambassador in Buenos Aires, Minister Albares has given President Milei the upper hand from now on, and that is a very serious mistake. The Argentine Republic is not Beluchistan, it is a friendly and brotherly country where 400,000 Spaniards live, where we are the second largest investor after the United States and where we have family, cultural, commercial and all kinds of interests that are now left without the protection of an ambassador. One misses ministers like Francisco Fernández Ordóñez, Javier Solana, Josep Piqué… because they would not have let Pedro Sánchez do what he has done.
© Atalayar / All rights reserved
