Colombia’s President Petro Lets Loose With Antisemitic Volley

Colombia’s far-left, addlepated president, Gustavo Petro, has just let loose with a spittle-flecked attack on Israel, revealing an even more amazing ignorance about the history of the Jews and the Palestinians than is usual in such cases. And unsurprisingly, he engages in classic antisemitism about Jews and money. He alludes darkly to “Zionism” — it’s clear he means Jews — that he claims controls much of “international finance” and thereby (how?) prevented the peace that the peace-loving Palestinian Arabs have always favored. More on President Petro’s idiotic outburst can be found here: “Colombian president: Zionism partially owns international financial capital,” by Michael Starr, Jerusalem Post, January 8, 2025:

Zionism has prevented peace in the Levant through its control of international finance, according to Colombian President Gustavo Petro.

“Zionism, strongly supported by international financial capital that it partially controls, prevents peace and unleashes horror on Palestine, leading its most radical factions into the trap set by terrorism,” he said Monday in response to criticism of his positions on the Israel-Hamas War.

It’s unclear how, or. why, Zionism “prevents peace in the “‘Levant” (a geographic term that includes Israel, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria). The Zionists had nothing to do with the long civil war (1975-1990) between Muslims and Christians in Lebanon, nor with the civil war (2011-2024) in Syria, nor with the “Black September” attack on the Hashemite rulers of Jordan. And the Zionists were not those who prevented “peace” with the Palestinian Arabs; they were constantly offering to make peace with the Arabs. Let’s remember the “Zionist” offer to make peace after the 1948 war, by turning Israel’s armistice lines into permanent borders, but that offer was rebuffed by the Arab states. After the Six-Day War, Israel again made clear it wanted to make peace; in Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s famous phrase, Israel was “waiting for a telephone call” from Arab leaders. But that phone call never came. Instead, thirteen Arab states at an Arab League meeting in Khartoum issued their “three No’s: no peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel.”

Again, in 2000, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Barak offered to make an extraordinarily generous territorial settlement as part of a peace proposal given to Arafat. The arch-terrorist and PLO leader did not even bother to answer; he simply walked out of the meeting, never to return. That treaty would have given the Palestinians a state of their own, which would have ultimately given included more than 92% of the West Bank, a compensatory percentage of Israeli territory, East Jerusalem, and all of Gaza. Arafat would not listen to any Israeli proposal unless it included the Palestinian “right of return,” which would have led to millions of “Palestinians” swamping Israel and destroying it as a Jewish state. In 2008, an even more generous settlement was offered by Prime Minister Ehud Barak to the PA’s President Mahmoud Abbas, which would have given the Palestinian state 96% of the West Bank, plus an even larger amount of territory, consisting of 5.8% of Israel, that would become part of that new state. In addition, Olmert offered to give up control of the Old City, which would be administered by five states — Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United States. Like Arafat before him. Abbas refused to even discuss the proposal, and walked away. All of this history is apparently unknown to Gustavo Petro, who continues to believe that it was the Palestinians who tried to make peace and the “Zionists” who rejected it.

“In 1948, Palestinians opened their cities and territories to Jews who fled the Nazis with the intention of coexisting, supposedly as they had done with the Jews that had already lived in the Levant,” Petro wrote on X/Twitter.

Complete nonsense. The Arabs did everything they could to prevent Jews fleeing Nazi-occupied from finding refuge in Mandatory Palestine. Pressure from Arabs was mainly responsible for the adoption of MacDonald’s White Paper of 1939 by the British Parliament. This White Paper limited Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine to 15,000 Jews a year for five years, after which the Arabs would have a veto on any further immigration. There was no “opening” of “Palestinian” cities and territories to Jews. In fact, from the early 20th century, Zionist pioneers were attacked and murdered by Arabs — the people whom Petro claims “opened their cities and territories” to the Jewish arrivals. Think of Joseph Trumpeldor, who died defending a small group of Jewish farmers in Tel Hai who in 1920 were attacked by Arab marauders. Think of the attacks on defenseless Jews in the Old City in 1920, beginning with the Nebi Musa riots, and the attempt by Vladimir Jabotinsky to organize and train self-defense units. Remember the 1929 attacks by Arabs on Jews in the holy city of Hebron, where every last Jew, man, woman, and child, was either murdered or expelled. Think of the incessant homicidal raids on Jewish villages during the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939, when only one British officer, Captain Orde Wingate, took it upon himself to teach the Jewish victims or these constant Arab attacks guerrilla tactics, including night-fighting. There was nothing “welcoming” about any of these Arab attacks on the Jews.