President Tabaré Vázquez of Uruguay is on a state visit to Israel. Yesterday, he said:

Uruguay is thousands of kilometers from here but Uruguayans, all of us, feel very, very close to Israel. This is bound to be the case because Jewish immigrants helped form the human landscape of Uruguay in the twentieth century and the Jewish community plays a prominent role in Uruguay today. Furthermore, our country played an important role in the creation of the state of Israel. We flatly reject any attempt to infringe the sovereign right of the people of Israel to have their land, their state, to grow in justice as a nation.

Who exactly is Tabaré Vázquez? An oncologist by profession, he was elected president of Uruguay in October 2004, breaking the eternal hegemony of the Nacional and Colorado parties and becoming his country’s first leftist leader. He leads a broad left coalition made up of 19 separate groups. These include the Communist and Socialist parties of Uruguay and the political inheritors of the Tupamaros guerrilla organization, whose leaders were detained without trial and tortured during the 1973-1985 dictatorship. Solid credentials, then, to go with a view of the Middle East that breaks the orthodoxy of much of the western left.