As if there weren't enough problems here, next week the Hague Group summit will be held in Bogotá. This is a grouping, or rather a conspiracy, of countries from the "global south" established by the Progressive International (Google it) with the sole purpose of "lynching" Israel.
This group, made up of Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, Senegal, South Africa, Malaysia, Namibia, and Colombia, seeks, according to its founding proclamation, to enforce rulings of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. It announces that it will prevent the transfer of arms to Israel and that it will close its ports to ships transporting fuel to the Jewish State if the fuel could be used to "commit or facilitate violations of humanitarian law and international human rights law." They have announced that they will implement the arrest warrants issued by the ICC, currently under review, against Israel's prime minister and former defense minister. These states declare that they will use all their power to "end the Israeli occupation of the State of Palestine and remove obstacles to the realization of the Palestinian people's right to self-determination." The navies of Belize and Bolivia have already taken appropriate measures to prevent ships en route to Israel from docking.
For this group, it's self-evident that Hamas terrorism doesn't exist, nor does the organization's infamous use of the Palestinian population of Gaza as a shield and propaganda tool, nor do the public executions of opponents in the Gaza Strip, nor the massacre of October 7, 2023, nor the unprovoked attacks on Israel by Hezbollah, Iran, the Houthis, and other pro-Iranian proxies. Nor does this group, with its bombastic name, consider Israel a subject of international law.
For the long-standing Cuban dictatorship, eager for some kind of international prominence, this group is a godsend, as the non-aligned movement, its once grand stage, has died unburied. The Plurinational Republic of Bolivia's foreign policy toward the Middle East is dictated by Tehran, which has sparked diplomatic and judicial clashes with Argentina over the AMIA case. Honduras, following the October 7 massacre, acquired military equipment from Israel and maintains its embassy in Jerusalem. Namibia, which has called for a boycott, maintains a fluid and quasi-secret diamond trade with Israel, one of the largest diamond cutters on the planet.
South Africa, for its part, despite having brought the case of "violation of the Genocide Convention" to the International Court of Justice, maintains diplomatic ties and dialogue with Israel, something our country unfortunately lost after the severance of diplomatic relations with Jerusalem.
The Hague Group's founding declaration nowhere mentions the search for a peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, nor does it make any reference to the multiple Security Council resolutions calling for a two-state solution and an end to terrorism. This group turns the conflict into a zero-sum game, contributing absolutely nothing to the search for peace between the two peoples. By failing to condemn Palestinian terrorism, it endorses it as a legitimate form of struggle, ignoring the pernicious harm it has done to the very Palestinian people the members of the Hague Group claim to defend.
This upcoming summit in Bogotá will be nothing more than a long list of condemnations, rejections, appeals, and empty declarations, nothing that contributes to peace and coexistence between the two peoples. Furthermore, it consolidates the conversion of personal positions far removed from the national interest into Colombia's international policy.
This editorial was originally published in Spanish in El Espectador.
