The deafening silence: Israel’s inexcusable absence from the Es-Smara chorus |
When projectiles tore through the air above Es-Smara on the evening of May 5 – landing near a civilian prison, behind a cemetery, and wounding a woman whose only crime was existing in the vicinity of a conflict she never chose – the world, for once, spoke with something approaching a unified throat.
The United States condemned the attack in language so muscular it rattled the windows of the Algerian junta. France followed with characteristic diplomatic precision. The European Union, the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Spain, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Liberia all issued denunciations ranging from the sternly worded to the unequivocally incendiary.
The UAE and even Qatar, in an unprecedented rhetorical escalation, branded the Polisario’s assault a “terrorist act” – terminology that, until this month, had been almost surgically absent from official Arab discourse on the Front.
I followed every statement. I tracked every embassy communiqué, every diplomatic tweet, every carefully calibrated expression of solidarity and outrage. As a journalist covering this dossier for years, I have learned that in international relations, what is said matters – but what is not said can be catastrophic.
Not a syllable. Not a perfunctory statement of concern. Not even the hollow, bureaucratic boilerplate that foreign ministries produce the way factories produce widgets. From the state that formally recognized Moroccan sovereignty over the Sahara in July 2023 – in a letter from Prime Minister Netanyahu to King Mohammed VI himself – there came only the vast, embarrassing hum of diplomatic nothingness.
Let me be precise about what this silence is, and what it is not. It is not a mystery. It is not an oversight. It is a calculated omission, and it is indefensible.
I am not in the business of........