Undiplomatic EU diplomats

"European diplomats helped draft the unilateral Palestinian statehood bid at the UN in November and they also helped to push it through. Now they want to isolate Israel further by recycling some of the most vicious accusations against Israel from the Arab league."

Thomas Sandell @ The Times of Israel

An internal report issued by EU countries consuls general in Jerusalem and Ramallah has called upon the EU member states to prevent financial transactions, including foreign direct investments from within the EU, in support of settlement activities, infrastructure and services.

Reading through the one-sided report leaves one with a Kafkaesque sense of reality. It is a bit like sitting through a one day UN Human Rights Council session in Geneva discussing only Israeli human rights violations. The discussion leaves out – per definition – any mentioning of Palestinian violations. When the question is raised, from time to time, why this is the case the answer is simple. The agenda item is about Israel, not about the Palestinians. This can be understood – though never accepted – in an international forum where human rights standards are defined by some of the cruelest authoritarian regimes in the world.

But Brussels is not Geneva. The European Union is said to be a community of values. These values, however, are shared today by only one country in the Middle East, namely Israel. How can it then be that the EU is constantly putting all the blame for the failed Middle East peace process on the Jewish state? Perhaps the values have disappeared and have been replaced with something else? Did anyone say "petro dollars"?

 The recent diplomatic report is nothing but a verbal onslaught against the Israeli government and in particular those living in the disputed territories. It suggests that "individual member states should consider denying entry to known settler activists". It also calls for "guidelines on retail labels for settler made products, such as wine or cosmetics, in order to guarantee consumers’ right to an informed choice". A rather sophisticated way of echoing the Nazi call, "kauf nicht bei Juden" (don’t buy from Jews). In one of the most mindboggling parts of the report, the diplomats are openly complaining that archeological sites are being dug up which creates a "partisan historical narrative of Jerusalem, placing emphasis on biblical and Jewish connotations of the area, while neglecting Christian and Muslim ties". What exactly does the report mean by "partisan historical narrative"? Are the authors perhaps suggesting, like Mahmoud Abbas, that there was never a Jewish temple in Jerusalem and that all Jews in Jerusalem are trespassers who will eventually have to be evacuated once Jerusalem has been proclaimed the capital of a Palestinian state? The report does not say, it only insinuates.

Will Cardinal Schönborn, a friend of Israel and the Jews, be the next Pope?

"We sinners of the past are called to become the allies of the future and stand faithfully by our Jewish friends." "Holocaust was only possible because the church did not understand its Jewish roots. [...] Church unity can only be established when we understand and appreciate these Jewish roots." Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn 

French newspaper Le Figaro reports that the Archbishop of Vienna Christoph Schönborn, is a serious papal contender. He is a friend of Israel and the Jewish people.

Catholic Schönborn Endorses Zionism (Washington Post, Mar. 31 2005)

Jerusalem, Israel -- A Roman Catholic Cardinal says European Christians' support for Israel is not based on Holocaust guilt and Christians should affirm Zionism as biblical.

Archbishop of Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, part of a visiting Austrian delegation, made the remarks in an address at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on the topic of "God's chosen land." After asking, "What does Eretz Yisrael [the Land of Israel] mean to us," Schoenborn answered by stressing the doctrinal importance to Christians of not only recognizing Jews' connection to the land, but also ensuring that Christian identification with the Jewish Bible not lead to a "usurpation" of Jewish uniqueness. "Only once in human history did God take a country as an inheritance and give it to His chosen people," Schoenborn said, adding that Pope John Paul II had himself declared the biblical commandment for Jews to live in Israel an everlasting covenant that remained valid today.

Christians, Schoenborn said, should rejoice in the return of Jews to the Holy Land as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.

A Palestinian priest challenged the cardinal on that point, asking how he could preach to his Palestinian congregation that the establishment of the modern Jewish state was not a "catastrophe," as they called it, or the result of European powers' guilty conscience following World War II. Schoenborn responded by saying that "I am myself a refugee" – at the end of World War II, when he was an infant, Schoenborn's parents fled to Austria from Czechoslovakia – and that he felt pained at the unrecognized injustice that thousands of Czechs had suffered. However, he said, both that case and the Arab-Israeli conflict were matters of international law, whereas the chosenness of the Jewish people and their inheritance in the Holy Land were matters of faith that date back to the Bible itself. Schoenborn also said he hoped the conflict here would be resolved in accordance with international law, and with respect to justice for the Palestinian people. "We are all longing for that solution," he said. "Yet I am not naive. Conflicts are part of [both sides'] love of the land, and always have been... There is no simple solution."