Colombia’s Gustavo Petro Should Realize That He Cannot Present Himself as an Honest Broker

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro has a fictional version of the recent history of Israel and the “Palestinians.” The Arabs who remained in Israel after 1948 were not “segregated”; nor were they subject to “apartheid.” They were immediately granted equal rights, civil and political, with the Jewish citizens of the state. Arabs serve on the Supreme Court, sit in the Knesset, go abroad as Israeli diplomats. The recent head of the largest bank, Bank Leumi, as an Arab. Arabs and Jews work in the same offices and the same factories. They play on the same sports teams and in the same orchestras. Arabs and Jews are treated by the same medical personnel, consisting of both Jews and Arabs. Once again it must be asked: does Gustavo Petro know any of this? If he found out about it, would it matter, or is he so antisemitic that his mental filter would block out all  information that contradicts his baseless assumptions?

“Colombian president: Zionism partially owns international financial capital,” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, January 8, 2025:

All the progressive peace-oriented actors, including Yasser Arafat, were dead and had been replaced by religious radical leadership in Israel and Gaza, Petro said.

Arafat, the arch-terrorist and leader of the PLO, is described by Petro as “progressive” and “peace-oriented.” But if he was “peace-oriented” why did he turn down flat — would not even discuss for a second — the generous peace offer Ehud Barak made in 2000, that would have given the Palestinians a state including all of Gaza, 92% of the West Bank, and east Jerusalem? And while “religious radical leadership” certainly describes Hamas in Gaza, it does not fit the current government of Israel led by the determinedly secular Benjamin Netanyahu.

“Peace is a human priority,” he said. “The progressive movements that still exist in the Arab world, Israel, and the United States should seek to meet. Perhaps progressive dialogue in the Middle East could find the paths to peace. Colombia must be ready to help whenever it is asked. Colombia’s path inside and outside the country is peace.”…

What “progressive movements” still exist in the Arab world? The military despots fighting for power in Libya? The military junta that effectively rules in Algeria? The military despot General Abdelfatttah el-Sisi in Egypt? The battling militias, Sunni and Shi’a, in Iraq? The Islamist-linked Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham in Syria? The terrorists of Hezbollah in Lebanon? The terrorists of Hamas in Gaza? The kings and emirs who rule in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Jordan ? Where are these “progressive movements” in the Arab world Petro believes can be counted on to make peace? They don’t exist. Instead, the Arabs in opinion polls have expressed their enthusiastic support for the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, in which 6,000 Hamas operatives, together with a few hundred civilians, smashed into southern Israel from Gaza and proceeded to torture, rape, mutilate, and murder 1,200 Israelis, and to take back to Gaza another 251, many of whom have been murdered in captivity.

Petro’s administration has been mired in one financial scandal after another. What better way to take peoples’ minds off these scandals than to present himself as a Peacemaker, ready for his close-up on the cover of Time and at a Nobel ceremony in Oslo? But his antisemitic venom about the “Zionists” and their supposed “control of international finance” (in classic antisemitism, Jews control all the money, or all the media, and sometimes both) should disqualify him from such a role.

Petro should realize that he cannot present himself as an honest broker, able to help bring peace to the Arabs and Israelis, since he has broken diplomatic ties with the Jewish state. Gustavo Petro cannot be taken seriously as a peacemaker, given his anti-Israel animus that has now blossomed into full-blown antisemitism, with his alarm over “Zionist control” of “international finance.” Let him stay in his office in Bogota, and clean up what has been called the “most corrupt administration in Colombia’s history.” Once he has done that — “vaste programme, monsieur” — he can tell us all about his exciting plans for reaching a peace agreement between the wicked “Zionists” and the innocent Arabs who for more than seventy-five years have been, in Petro’s imaginative version, the innocent victims of the bellicose Jewish state.