Good morning,
Anyone still following the news during summer can't fail to have noticed that there was no holiday for the Gaza and Ukraine wars, which only got worse, if that was possible.
The two Goliaths, Israel and Russia, amped up aggression against the two Davids, Palestinian people and Ukraine, and probably for the same reasons: to cause as much harm as possible before ceasefire talks finally get under way.
Everybody in Europe, except Hungary, agrees Russians are the bad guys in that war, but less than a qualified majority of EU countries can agree that Israel has also lost the moral high ground due to its horrifying war crimes.
I stopped seeking comments from Russian diplomats about three years ago because all they do is lie and spread hate speech, so there's nothing worth printing.
Israeli diplomats stopped talking to me about two years ago because they didn't like my interview with Israel's EU ambassador – access journalism.
So instead, I spoke with one of Europe's most senior rabbis, Pinchas Goldschmidt, last week, who also parroted Israeli lies, for instance that Israel is letting enough food into Gaza and there's no famine there.
Maybe he just reads right-wing Israeli media and has been misled.
But what struck me more broadly was his utter lack of compassion for civilian Palestinian victims, whom he seemed to equate with Hamas.
Indeed, for the rabbi, whose office makes him the conscience of orthodox Jews in Europe, the shocking level of Israeli violence was excusable because Israeli society felt "traumatised".
And for him, if a Jewish person in Brussels felt uncomfortable because of a charity fundraiser for Palestinian aid, then that was a fair enough reason to shut it down.
Russian leaders dehumanised Ukrainians before the 2022 invasion and Israeli leaders have done the same to Palestinians, so Jewish psychological discomfort has now become more important than Palestinians' most fundamental human rights.
Meanwhile, the London PR agency that set up the Goldschmidt interview didn't like the outcome and also warned me I would lose access to their high-level contacts if we didn't change it (we didn't).
I'm pretty sure there will be a lot more bad news from both conflicts before any good news.
But in the meantime, you can trust EUobserver to follow its heart, instead of playing journalistic games, like quoting unfiltered garbage just to have 'both sides of the story', or watering down its texts in order to get VIP-based clicks.
– Andrew Rettman, foreign affairs editor
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