Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, José Manuel Albares, affirmed yesterday that the diplomatic crisis between Spain and Israel has been settled with the reciprocal summoning of their respective ambassadors.
Last Friday, the Israeli Foreign Minister, Eli Cohen, summoned the Spanish Ambassador in Tel Aviv, Ana Sálomon, after accusing the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, of “supporting terrorism” for stating, during his tour of Israel, Palestine and Egypt, that Israel’s response to the Hamas attack was “disproportionate” and that Spain defends “a lasting ceasefire” in the Gaza Strip. In response, José Manuel Albares summoned Israel’s ambassador to Madrid. Rodica Radian-Gordon, and called Cohen’s accusations “totally false and unacceptable”.
The meeting with the Israeli ambassador took place this past Monday at the Ministry’s headquarters. “We have clarified two things,” Albares declared during an interview to Telecinco’s program La mirada crítica. “The first, that the completely false words directed by the Government of Israel towards Pedro Sánchez are unacceptable to us and can never happen again,” he explained. “The second, we recall what we have been saying since the very day of the terrorist attack: that rejection (of the attack) and solidarity with the victims of that attack,” he added.
To the question of whether the crisis between Israel and Spain has been settled with this conversation, Albares answered: “Both what our ambassador in Israel has told me and what the Israeli ambassador told me make me believe that it has”. “What Spain will not tolerate are new statements along these lines,” he insisted.
Later, upon his arrival in Brussels to participate in the NATO ministerial, Albares reiterated that “the attitude of the (Israeli) ambassador, and also what our ambassador in Israel told me” about “the attitude there was in that meeting” is that “it has been sufficiently clarified that no more statements in that sense will be tolerated” and that “no more false statements that are totally unacceptable should ever be made, neither towards the President of the Government, nor towards any member of the Government.”
“We want to have the best relations with Israel and I have conveyed this to its Minister of Foreign Affairs,” Albares continued during his interview on Telecinco. “Commercially we have a very solid relationship with Israel and Spanish companies have the guarantee that they will always have the Government of Spain at their side,” he said.
Albares did not want to comment on the Hamas communiqué in which he thanked Pedro Sanchez for his “clear and bold” stance against Israel. “I am not going to comment on the communiqué of a terrorist organization,” he declared. “We were among the first countries to condemn this terrorist attack and it is something very serious,” he assured.
