El País is a great newspaper. It was founded in 1976, just a few months after the death of the tyrant Franco, and has been a pillar of the transition to democracy in Spain. It’s generally sympathetic to the Spanish Socialist Party and supportive of liberal, progressive politics. It has had no truck with violent Basque separatism.

However, it has a couple of blind spots. In today’s edition one of the leaders, titled After Olmert, looks back at the Israeli prime minister’s stewardship of his country and assesses the situation that will face his predecessor.  This is my translation of the second sentence of the text;

Ehud Olmert has been suffering from a fatal political wound since, a few months after taking office, he ordered the invasion of Lebanon in the summer of 2006 in which the Israeli army was humiliated by Hezbollah.

And that’s all it says about the Second Lebanon War. No prizes for spotting the rather important missing facts nor any for speculating about the reaction of El País or the Spanish government if an ETA commando had launched a cross-border murder and kidnap raid from France on the 12^th of July 2006.