Eduardo Galeano is a Uruguayan writer, probably best known for The Open Veins of Latin America, a vaporous whinge of a book that pins the blame for each and every woe that besets this continent on the Spanish colonizers, British and American imperialism and foreigners in general.

In today’s Pagina/12 he writes about recent events in Gaza. According to the sage of Montevideo, Palestinians

… don’t even have the right to choose who governs them.  When they vote for those they shouldn’t vote for, they are punished. Gaza is being punished. It has been turned into a sealed trap since Hamas won fair elections in 2006.

The facts are evidently not Galeano’s forte. Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006. Those elections returned members for the West Bank and Gaza. They didn’t give Hamas a mandate to seize  power for itself in Gaza, which is what it did in June 2007.

The homemade and badly aimed rockets fired by Hamas into the territory which was once Palestinian and which was usurped by the Israeli occupation are the product of desperation.

The Palestinian struggle is, therefore, not for a state of their own alongside Israel, but to destroy  Israel and replace it with a Palestinian state. It’s good that he’s clear on this.

In each of its defensive wars, Israel has swallowed another piece of Palestine and the lunches continue.

Believe me, the metaphor doesn’t work any better in Spanish but I think he is trying to say that Israel has never abandoned occupied territory. Well, it removed its colonists from the entire Gaza Strip and closed four settlements in the northern West Bank in 2005. No one in their right mind expects Palestinians to be grateful for this but it was a start. Unfortunately, the leadership of Hamas interpreted this move as a sign that the Jews were finally cracking and one more heave would see them packing up and leaving Tel Aviv and Jerusalem too. That was quite a mistake.

[Israel] is the only country which has legalized that torture of prisoners.

Wrong again.

Or did the green light [for the attack on Hamas] come from the controlling power that has in Israel its most loyal vassal.

Hey, at least he’s not in bed with Mearsheimer and Walt.

The Israeli army, the most sophisticated in world knows who it kills. It doesn’t kill in error, it kills in horror.

Once again, the struggle for literary effect  doesn’t turn out well and the second sentence sounds as odd in Spanish as it does in English. In any case, he’s wrong on the facts. The Israeli army, just like all armies, makes errors. During the current round of hostilities in Gaza these errors have included the killing and wounding of a number of its own members.

The article ends with Galeano taking a tired red herring out for a swim;  the idea that because Arabs are supposedly Semites themselves, their ideas and activities and ideologies can’t be held to be antisemitic.

… the hunting of Jews was always a European custom but for the last half century this historic debt is being paid by Palestinians who are themselves Semites and who never were and are not now antisemites. They are paying, in blood, the debts of others.

Not only is this idea unfounded, it’s also an insult to Hamas and its supporters. Their movement’s founding covenant makes it clear that they don’t see themselves as having anything at all in common with Jews and also leaves little doubt as to what they think the ultimate fate of Jews should be.

The article is dedicated to,

… my Jewish friends murdered by the Latin American dictatorships advised by Israel.

A nice variation on the “Some of my best friends are Jewish” theme, and another little act of hypocrisy too. The  murdered  Latin American Jews who participated in armed revolutionary violence -  violence which took innocent lives as well as others - in the 1970s are heroes, while living Jews  who attack a movement that would kill every last one of them if it had the chance are savages and criminals.