Pickup lines for the European Union
Dear European Union,
Maybe we should date. I mean, not literally, but you have this thing, always surprising me from anew, it’s amazing. Say, until this week I had no idea you cared so much about history, and then you mentioned very seriously (in an official directive!) cease-fire lines that have disappeared 46 years ago as the basis for your relation with an ally. What a commitment to the past! Oh, right, it makes you look like you’re suffering from Alzheimers and completely out of touch with the realities on the ground by saying again and again the same nonsense but don’t feel bad. By the way, denying the situation in the West-Bank/Judea and Samaria by claiming it is not internationally recognized while demanding to come back to a status quo ante that wasn’t any more internationally recognized by anyone for one part and that didn’t even exist for the other might push people to make fun of your poor reasoning. But I understand, you had to sell Greece and the rules of logic its ancient inhabitants discovered with it.
You surprise me. Again, I had no idea you cared about what people do with the money you give them. I didn’t know you feared so much to lose your moral standing that you prefer to partially cut scientific links with the Hebrew university because its 1924 mount Scopus campus was besieged for 19 years by Jordanian forces. I thought you were still behaving like in the good old days, when your financial support served building Hezbollah-run schools in Lebanon or villas for PLO plutocrats all over the Palestinian territories, or when you carelessly armed jihadist militant groups in Syria who massacre people from other backgrounds. I understand, building Jewish homes in the Jewish homeland is the real ethnic cleansing.
You see dear European Union, I know you’re an old lady who still suffers from time to time from the overthrow-foreign-governments-fixation syndrome, and I don’t blame you. It’s a rare disease. It doesn’t often happen that we hear in some parliaments in Africa, Asia… calls to push away Hollande, Cameron or Merkel in favor of a more accommodating leader, as European parliament member Daniel Cohn-Bendit openly did a few weeks ago. And, as many old people, you are convinced younger ones aren’t able to solve their conflict without you, stupid as they are compared to you (even when they are actually older than you).
But here our paths diverge: I am Israeli, I know Arabs/Palestinians, I know all those societies are made of independent men and women who know what they want and what they think is right and true. Above all they don’t need stupid interventions such as this one, that have only one effect: strengthening the radicals that have oppressed the Palestinians for way too long and used them in the most despicable way in order to build for themselves a dictatorship (actually two as for today). By the way, dear Europe, I know Brussels isn’t exactly the best example of democracy but still, I just don’t succeed in understanding how you can call “legitimate” a leader who has lost elections for a 4-year mandate and is still in power 7 years later? Are we, Israelis, supposed to see in him a truly representative person that can sign agreements in the name of the Palestinians?
So dear European Union, you should stop acting like this. Or if you really want to, do this in Northern Cyprus, do this in the Caucasus, do this in Syria or Pakistan/India, not here. Here you have done too many mistakes and said too much crap to have any credibility left and this may, ultimately, hurt our friendship.
Best regards,
A French-Israeli peace seeker (I guess that is supposed to make me a citizen of the European Union)
PS: next time you start claiming Israeli presence is illegitimate even at the Western wall, don’t do it around the day of the Jewish calendar reserved to superpowers which oppressed the Jewish people before coming back to darkness, it stupidly makes you look like them.