2023-10-18 22:53:56
Thousands of people have died in Israel and Gaza (Palestine) in the last ten days. Hundreds of them, minors. Some, for the Hamas incursion and the indiscriminate massacre they committed against Israeli civilians of all ages and conditions. The others, as a consequence of a military reaction that does not distinguish terrorists from children, doctors, journalists or refugees trying to escape an announced land invasion. A conflict that has been entrenched for decades, which has been the subject of multiple UN resolutions that delimit its contours, and which Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s PP has not hesitated to use internally against the coalition government.
The PP rushes out to try to link the Government with Hamas between unverified information and manipulations
“I think that the President of the Government should put order, although I understand that the votes of Sumar and the votes of Podemos are decisive for him to continue as President of the Government,” the current head of the opposition told reporters this Tuesday. . “It loses the international prestige of Spain,” he added. “We Spaniards lose because of the political mess that remains in the Government in a notorious way and, now also, in a rude way,” he pointed out.
It was almost Feijóo’s only public intervention since last week he accused Sumar of having “equidistant or understanding positions with the terrorist activity of Hamas that has cost several victims and kidnappings of the Israeli population.”
Since then, silence, except for the slight statements obtained by journalists on Tuesday. The leader of the PP met this Wednesday with a group of “experts” among whom were his general secretary, Cuca Gamarra, the deputy secretary of Institutional Affairs, Esteban González Pons, the former Foreign Minister José Manuel García-Margallo, the former Secretary of State for the EU, Íñigo Méndez de Vigo, or the Secretary of Foreign Action of the PP, Gabriel Mato, among others.
After the meeting, held 10 days after the Hamas attack and Israel’s virulent reaction, the PP sent a canned video to journalists with a statement from Pons and without the option of any question. In it, the leader assures: “In the Government of Spain, anti-Semitism should have no place. Pedro Sánchez, who calls himself a democrat, should root out anti-Semitism so that it does not take root in the Government.”
Pons also attacks the President of the Government for the supposed irrelevance of Spain in the management and hypothetical resolution of this new crisis between Israel and Palestine. An idea in which the PP has abounded almost from the beginning, especially due to the conflict opened by the Israeli Embassy in Spain after calling a part of the Government “immoral”, which it accused of aligning with Hamas. Specifically, to the Minister of Social Rights and Secretary General of Podemos, Ione Belarra, who has accused Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration of committing “war crimes” in Gaza.
The response of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was immediate in defense of Belarra. And even in the PP they agree that the statement from the Israeli embassy could have been “a little more accurate,” in Feijóo’s own words. But the main party of the Spanish right, which still trusts that Pedro Sánchez’s investiture will be derailed and that he will return to the polls next January, has not hesitated to make the same accusations, and to seek the accusation of the parties that make up the coalition Government with motions and acts of mourning and protest in which a part of the civilian victims of the conflict has been intentionally left out: the Palestinians.
One of the harshest against the central government has been that of the president of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso. “Sánchez has been isolated from the rest of the most important governments in the West, when Spain holds the rotating Presidency of the EU,” she wrote on Twitter. “He does not sign the condemnation manifesto because half the government is against Israel,” she stated, to finish off with a message against EH Bildu’s favorable vote for Sánchez’s investiture: “Indecency is agreeing with the murderers of your colleagues.”
It was not the first message in that sense. “Spain is not there nor is it expected until there is a change of government,” she also said about a joint statement from the US, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and France. A document in which these countries, members of the G8, also appealed to the “legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians.” Ayuso ignored that part of the message and, that same day, showed his “support and affection for the family of Maya Villalobo, the young Spanish woman murdered in Israel, and for all the victims of the Hamas terrorist attacks, wherever they are from.” ”. And even he promoted the unverified information of dozens of babies’ throats cut during the Palestinian group’s incursion.
40 babies decapitated and the Sánchez government walks in the middle between the terrorists and the victims. https://t.co/xjYPpCwDBW
— Isabel Díaz Ayuso (@IdiazAyuso) October 10, 2023
Israel, “a shock”
But this time Ayuso did not set the PP’s discursive path, but rather it was the national leadership itself that set the bar very high. The Deputy Secretary of Culture of the PP, Borja Sémper, assured on October 9, two days after the attack against Israel, that there are “certain political formations that have ideological and political closeness to the Hamas environment.”
In the opinion of Sémper, who for years represented the moderate wing of the Basque PP and defended the inclusion of EH Bildu in the political life of Euskadi, he said that “a part” of the Government had “justified” the Hamas attack, which demanded “condemn with the necessary forcefulness.”
But it had already happened. The Government, led by Sánchez, condemned the Hamas attacks on the same day they occurred. And the second vice president and leader of Sumar, Yolanda Díaz, stated that she was “dismayed by the images coming from the south of Israel and Gaza,” in addition to offering her “solidarity with all the victims.” Her spokesperson, Ernest Urtasun, also condemned “the acts of Hamas,” which he described as “war crimes.”
And that “all the victims” is, according to the PP, the basis of its criticism of the Government and part of the coalition. In the days after the Hamas attack, and when Israel’s military offensive had already led to criticism from the EU through its foreign representative, Josep Borrell, Feijóo’s party promoted statements and acts of rejection in different institutions governed by the right: from city councils to regional governments and parliaments.
The common denominator of the calls was to isolate the Hamas attack and decontextualize it from the decades of open conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis, in addition to the surrounding Arab countries. In Madrid, for example, the call was launched by a supposedly non-partisan body such as the Federation of Municipalities, which made its calls coincide with those promoted by the PP.
The PSOE participated in many of these protests, and not others. But the absence of the parties integrated into Sumar allowed the PP to brand them as “equidistant.” An accusation that remains.
This Monday, Sémper appeared at a press conference at the PP headquarters in which he pointed out that Sumar’s position “projects an image of Spain that reduces credibility and weakens the country’s position” at the international level. The leader defended Israel’s “right” to “pursue terrorists” anywhere, tiptoed over the hundreds of Palestinians killed in the Netanyahu Government’s response, as well as the UN’s express requests for Israel not to cut water and electricity to the entire Gaza Strip, where hundreds of thousands of people live.
The Deputy Secretary of Culture and Open Society subtly defended that the PP recognizes the right to a “Palestinian State”, and even defended that Gaza is not an occupied territory, but an “autonomous territory”, despite the fact that the UN considers Israel “occupying force” in its resolutions.
It was at that press conference in which Sémper said he saw the coalition government “broken.” Then came the statement from the Israeli Embassy and the response from Foreign Affairs.
On Tuesday morning, Feijóo insisted on the division of the Government, the “political mess” and that Israel is “in shock”, which is why he urged “not to have a conflict” with the Middle Eastern country.
His position was later confirmed by his ‘number two’, Cuca Gamarra. “We have a government in office capable of squandering our country’s foreign policy credit,” he said at a press conference in Congress. “We are not here to have enemies, but to have the leadership role that Spain has always had,” he concluded.
Pons followed the same path of justification as Israel on Wednesday. In the video statement, the deputy secretary tiptoed over the attack on a hospital in Gaza on Tuesday night, the authorship of which is in doubt, and asked “that the terrorists lay down their weapons, freeing those kidnapped.” He also reiterated that Israel has the legitimate right to defense, “although he urged the country to comply with” the norms of international law “and avoid” victims and suffering among the civilian population. ”
Pons’s phrase is far from what his former leader, Mariano Rajoy, said 11 years ago. In November 2012, and already as President of the Government, called for “restraint” from Israel during a press conference at Moncloa accompanied by the then president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff. The chief executive had called his counterpart to tell her in person. He was none other than the current Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
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