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Gesture Politics Won't Help Palestinians

(New York Times) Bret Stephens - This month, France, Canada, Australia and possibly Britain will recognize a Palestinian state at the UN General Assembly. And the government of Spain has imposed an arms embargo on Israel. Will a single Gazan be helped in any meaningful way by any of this? No. Will Israel be hurt? Not particularly. Will it exacerbate Western antisemitism? More than likely. After Madrid announced its embargo, I wondered what weapons, if any, did it sell to Israel. None, as far as I can discover. But, at least until this month, Spain was an eager customer for Israeli military equipment, to the tune of over one billion euros between Oct. 2023 and last April. My advice to Israel, let Madrid hope that its anti-Israel posturing will keep the terrorist threat at bay. Somewhere near the center of the Israeli psyche lies the thought: The world is out to get us. And much that's happened since Oct. 7, 2023, has proved them right: Being accused of genocide the same month they were grotesquely massacred. Watching a pogrom unfold on the streets of Amsterdam. Seeing elderly Jews burned alive in Colorado. Diaspora Jews are living through the worst era of open antisemitism since the 1930s. The leaders of Canada, France, and Australia are contributing to a climate of anti-Jewish demonization by treating Israel as a quasi-pariah state whose presumptive supporters can be viewed as guilty accomplices. In their virtue-signaling foreign policy, they are inflicting genuine harm on their own Jewish citizens.
2025-09-11 00:00:00
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