Lluis Bassets a journalist at El País. Not just any journalist either, he’s the newspaper’s associate editor and is in charge of its op-ed section. Naturally, he also has own blog on the paper’s website. There you can read stuff like this.

Those who love Israel and are committed to its survival and security as a Jewish state - which ought to stand for liberty, democracy, tolerance and plurality - can neither applaud its militarist drift nor allow its right to defend itself to turn into an inhuman and atrocious reprisal, beyond the reach of both human and divine law. Sympathy and love for Israel mustn’t lead to confusion between ideas and feelings. “Israel right or wrong” is what some of its unconditional supporters seem to think, ready as they are to support anything its government simply because the government in question is that of Israel. They are making a grave moral error but also a political one, because an Israel perpetually at war against its neighbors is not a viable country.

“…beyond the reach of both human and divine law”. Bassets doesn’t hold back with the rhetorical heavy artillery, does he? The crimes Israel is alleged to have committed are so horrific that even the Almighty himself can do nothing to prevent them. Wow. What kind of country is it that not even God can stop? There can’t be many other countries as evil as that, can they? I mean, let’s be honest, it’s the most evil country of all, a Lucifer of a nation state.

But no, I’m being horribly unfair when I write stuff like this because Bassets’ article runs under the headline “Israel in danger” and he’s saying this stuff for Israel’s own good, isn’t he? What’s a little hard to understand is how he can reconcile the idea of Israel as a Satan-Nation with the invocation to the values he sees as being basic to a Jewish state at the start of the paragraph.

And, of course, he can’t resist saying that Israel is perpetually at war with its neighbors. One hears this said and written so often that one almost starts to believe it. It’s pretty hard to square with the facts though. Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt, its largest and most powerful Arab enemy, in 1979 and it signed a peace deal with Jordan in 1994, after decades of a de facto non-belligerence pact between the two nations. It hasn’t signed a peace agreement with Syria yet but there has been more than three decades of calm on the mutual border of two nations.

That leaves Lebanon, the Palestinians and faraway Iran, where grave problems indeed remain to be resolved. None of them, however, justify casual talk of Israel being perpetually at war with its neighbors

The same allegiance to myth rather than fact may be noted elsewhere in the text when Bassets cites Sylvain Cypel with approval. She’s a French journalist and Bassets is careful to point out that she’s also Jewish. That must mean that she has special knowledge about Israel and its policies unavailable to the rest of us, no?

Anyway, the quote goes like this:

For more than one hundred years the strategy of first the Yishuv, and later Israel has been to construct a fortress and expand it endlessly through a policy of establishing facts on the ground.

Eh? I wonder what part the withdrawal from Sinai in 1980 to make peace with Egypt, the territorial concessions to Jordan in 1994 for similar reasons, the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 all play in this strategy of limitless expansion.

Israel must be the only country in the world that can he accused of expansionism in the columns of a major international newspaper when the territory it controls has been shrinking for decades. That’s possible because for Bassets and others like him, the facts don’t matter when it comes to writing about Israel, all that matters is attacking it. Attacking it directly or attacking it shielded by proclamations of good will and sympathy, it comes down to the same thing.