Why just pick on Israel?

Although not wanting to rain on the new president’s parade, I have a question for him: why, in his only reference to foreign policy in the state of the nation address, did he select Israel for comment?

In a world where there are indisputable gross human rights abuses — such as in Myanmar, which is carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign against the Rohingya Muslims; Iran, which is jailing and torturing hundreds of thousands of political opponents who dared to go out in the streets; Syria, where Bashar al-Assad is slaughtering and chemically bombing civilians (including Palestinians); Turkey, which has imprisoned and destroyed the lives of thousands deemed by its sultan as subversive; not to mention fellow Brics members Russia and China — why would Israel alone be mentioned as an obstruction to peace?

The elevation of Israel to perpetrator number one is bizarre, especially when there is an equally valid narrative, substantiated by facts, that it is not Israel that is obstructing peace talks but the badfaith Palestinian leadership, whose stated object is not a two-state solution but to take the territory “from the Jordan to the sea” — a narrative never properly interrogated.

The incoming administration has urgent foreign policy imperatives, but more in the interests of SA, such as mending relations with its main trading partners Europe and the US and dealing with the relationships with a suspect Russia and a colonial China.

Sydney Kaye Cape Town