Von der Leyen, Borrell and the 75th anniversary of his colonial garden in Palestine
In her chained stereotypes, von der Leyen used the massacres against Jewish persons perpetrated for centuries in Europe to justify their "safe haven" in Palestine. In expressing this idea, she unintentionally made two egregious acknowledgments.
On Wednesday, April 26, Ursula von der Leyen congratulated "Israel" on its 75th anniversary of its establishment in Palestine. Von der Leyen needed only the first 45 seconds of her tribute to make as much accumulation as possible of the fraudulent, racist and fascist mythology with which the West has always justified the invasion of Palestine initiated by European settlers just over a century ago.
Lest there be any doubt about the ideological orientation of his speech, von der Leyen from the very beginning showed her joy at the "dream come true" of the Israeli colonial artifact. The dream of the creation of "Israel" was the dream of Zionist ideology, and therefore von der Leyen assumed from the outset the first postulate of Zionism: the dream of creating a state of foreign settlers in Palestine, "and that is more important than the wishes of the Arab inhabitants living in that land", in the words of Arthur Balfour, the then-British Foreign Secretary who in 1917 promised to hand over Palestine to the European settlers. The President of the European Commission endorsed Balfour's contempt for the native Palestinians, their rights and their very existence, as she did not even name them in her speech. The crushing of the native population, along with other features, characterizes Zionism as a fascist ideology.
It should be remembered that Zionism was declared a criminal and racist ideology by the UN General Assembly in 1975, and that this resolution was repealed in 1991 to please "Israel" and thus facilitate the fraudulent Oslo Accords of 1993. These were defeats for the decolonization struggles in the context of the beginning of US hegemony after the fall of the Soviet bloc. Thirty years later, we find ourselves with the paradox that Israeli lobbies are trying to get the UN to officially endorse Zionism, colonialism and apartheid in Palestine. They are trying to persuade Antonio Guterres and Miguel Angel Moratinos to have the UN adopt the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which is nothing more than a crude contract of allegiance to the Israeli colonial regime.
In her chained stereotypes, von der Leyen used the massacres against Jewish persons perpetrated for centuries in Europe to justify their "safe haven" in Palestine. In expressing this idea, she unintentionally made two egregious acknowledgments. The first, that the Palestinians must foot the bill for the crimes of Germany and other European countries against Jews, no matter what price those native Palestinians have to pay. The second is that even today the so-called European democracies are still unable to guarantee the safety of Jewish people and, therefore, it is necessary for them to have a distant refuge, being eternally alien and almost foreigners in their own Western countries of birth.
Ursula von der Leyen also recited the Bible to claim that Palestine is the "promised land of the Jews". Using the Bible as the registry record of the ownership of a territory elevates to a new mythological dimension, the "rules-based world" repeatedly proclaimed by the US and its subordinate EU. A world "based on rules" unfamiliar to "Israel" even; If the EU's top representative had also raised and waved a Bible with her hands in front of the camera, it would have replicated the same farce we saw in 2019at the UN Security Council by the then ambassador of the Israeli regime, Danny Danon.
The description of "Israel" in the video as a "vibrant democracy in the heart of the Middle East" has a supremacist meaning identical to Josep Borrell's statement of "Europe is a garden", to which he added, “most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden”. The litany of "vibrant democracy" is the Western dogma covering up the ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians, their dispossession, expulsion, apartheid, or ghettoization. It is praise identical to the white democracy of apartheid in South Africa expressed by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the last years of the colonial regime in Pretoria. The political and judicial disputes we observe in Israeli settler society are no different from those in white South African settler society at the beginning of its countdown.
Ursula von der Leyen tells us with feigned emotion that she herself has seen how the Israeli colonial regime has made "the Negev desert bloom", Naqab in its original Palestinian name. In her visit to that part of Palestine, renamed "Israel", the EU's highest representative, however, did not want to see the policies of land dispossession and forced ghettoization that this government applies to Palestinianswho have Israeli citizenship. They have lived for centuries in the Naqab, have taken indigenous and traditional advantage of natural resources, and even have land deeds dating back to Ottoman times. All this does not matter, because for her this region flourishes when, after the usurpation of the land and eviction of its owners, "Israel" imposes capitalist industrial agriculture and livestock farming, in accordance with the concept of circular economy between the metropolis and the colony. The Israeli machinery applies the same policies of spoliation and forced displacement to its own third-class indigenous citizens as it applies to the indigenous non-citizens of the West Bank and Gaza ghettos surviving under its military dictatorship.
Like the parasitic regime in occupied Palestine, Von der Leyen calls this anniversary Israeli "Independence Day," seeking to create the idea that the many settlers from different countries who have invaded Palestine these past hundred years were gaining independence from someone, although it is not known from whom.
The final 45 seconds of the message are a plea for "shared ties and values" between the EU and the Israeli colonial artifact. Just as the colonization of Algeria had its metropolis in France, or the colonization of Angola in Portugal, the colonization of Palestine currently has a joint metropolis formed by the US and the EU, and they will defend that supremacist contraption until the day before the future collapse of the monstrosity. On that day there will be no apology or accountability from the West, just as France does not accept to take responsibility for its massacres in Algeria.
The Von der Leyen-Borrell couple is the successor of the Reagan-Thatcher couple in their defense of apartheid and colonialism. History repeats itself twice, both times as a tragedy for the native South Africans and Palestinians, although the farcical component is not lacking in this current version due to her use of biblical mythology.
And what about the excluded indigenous Palestinians in Von der Leyen's discourse? The denial of their existence, of their rights, and of all the legislation that protects them, including the right to legitimate armed resistance, the failure to silence the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Zionist colonial regime. Not even the mythological and colonial clichés of its discourse are novel or original.
All European colonizations by settlers against indigenous populations (North America, Australia, South Africa, Algeria, etc.) have been justified in a manner similar to that used by the EU's highest representative: 'the natives do not exist, and if they did exist, they were not exactly in that place. And if they were in the place, they did not use the land, nor did they deserve it. And if they used the land, unfortunately, they lost it and that is irreversible, it can no longer be changed, at most we can grant them some human rights. We also had the need to settle on that land, because we are also indigenous to that land'. This is the argumentative scheme of indigenous denial and invasive justification that today is applied in victorious colonial regimes disguised as liberal democracies such as the USA, Canada or Australia. "Israel" would like to find itself in this group in the future, but it will not.
Seventy-five years later, the Israeli construct is defeated and finished on the horizon. First, because of the indigenous Palestinian population, which is already a demographic majority (52% of the population between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, and increasing) against the Israeli settler society (48% of the population and decreasing) resisting by all legitimate means on their land. Second, because it is militarily defeated against the Palestinians, Lebanon and other allies; but explaining this is beyond the scope of this article.
It has only a countdown of less than twenty years ahead of it. The sooner it decolonizes its structures, the less will be the suffering for the natives, and the less the price to pay and the suffering that will grow day by day for the settler society.
In the meantime, during the years that "Israel" remains standing, Josep Borrell, Ursula von der Leyen and other ringleaders of the Western metropolis will continue to take care of this colonial garden installed in the heart of their racist jungle.