This past week, Social Europe published an article by Josep Borrell in which the former High Representative expresses certain judgments he clearly would never have allowed himself to express publicly six months ago. His term as the equivalent of Europe’s foreign minister ended on November 30, 2024. The title of his article expresses his willingness to diverge from the authority he literally represented: “Gaza’s Descent Into Catastrophe Tests Europe’s Conscience.”
Borrell’s choice of the word “catastrophe” reflects the kind of diplomatic ambiguity ― some would say timidity ― that could have been avoided had he dared to invoke “war crimes.” For most English speakers, the idea of catastrophe suggests a natural, uncontrolled chain of events, what insurers used to call “an act of God.” Earthquakes, wildfires and landslides unequivocally merit the term catastrophe when populations are affected. So do droughts, floods and violent weather attributable to climate change. Because there is no consensus about whether humans should be held responsible for global warming, these events can be deemed natural.
But what sane person would compare what has been taking place in Gaza over the past 18 months to a natural catastrophe? Borrell’s choice of vocabulary reveals his lingering taste for diplomatic tact, even in a context in which diplomacy is no longer required. It leaves us wondering what the private man really thinks? What vocabulary might he be using in intimate settings with friends and family?
Borrell offers a few hints, such as this one. “Throughout my term, I observed how significantly this double standard weakened the EU’s standing globally, not only in the Muslim world but also across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Spain and a few other European nations have voiced concerns, asking the Commission to examine whether Israel’s conduct aligns with its obligations under its association agreement with the EU. Their calls, however, have reportedly been met largely with silence.”
Today’s Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary definition:
Voice concern:
Express judgment in reaction to an unambiguous moral failure in such a way as to indicate that one has no intention of doing anything about correcting the designated crime or sin, and no expectation that it will ever be seriously addressed.
Contextual note
We should note that the only parties Borrell mentions who “have voiced concern” are “Spain and a few other European nations.” His framing tells us these are marginal voices within a concert of approval of Israel’s policies and actions.
Borrell’s formulation contains his own personal version of diplomatic ambiguity. It may express three different readings of the situation. The first would indicate his pessimism as he concludes only a minority will ever stand up for what he presents as a moral issue. The second is an implicit but restrained critique of European leaders for their failure to admit to practicing a double standard, a polite synonym for hypocrisy. The third reading communicates Borrell’s resigned acceptance of a logic he appears to disagree with but which defines an institution he continues to identify with.
Echoing the practice of The New York Times and other Western media in their reporting on Israel’s destruction of Gaza and its population, Borrell, the professional diplomat, relies on the passive voice to describe the elements of the catastrophe while avoiding naming the perpetrators. All of his descriptions state the facts as effects with no identified agent, such as when he reminds readers that “thousands more Palestinian civilians, predominantly women and children, have been killed, and the lives of the surviving hostages have been put in peril.” He adds that “a total blockade and widespread famine have catastrophically worsened an already dire humanitarian situation. Most buildings and infrastructure have been destroyed.”
Who “killed” those women and children? Who put them “in peril?” Borrell’s passive voice suggests that the blockade somehow managed to worsen itself without requiring any human input. He later tells us that “Gaza has become a war primarily against children.” It’s the war that is against children, not the Israeli government!
We can read this as a lesson concerning the worst tendencies of someone professionally trained to use diplomatic language. Such language, using the passive voice systematically to avoid assigning guilt, may make sense when negotiating with Israeli officials. It’s a way of reminding them of the gravity of facts for which they will be held accountable. But such language begins to resemble hypocrisy in a piece written for the general public that needs to grapple with the facts.
Historical note
Historians will be remiss if they fail to note what increasingly appears as the most obvious trend in international relations during the first quarter of the 21st century: the death of diplomacy. Nations involved in conflicts no longer feel the need to resolve conflict through dialogue. The implicit logic of a permanent and existential cold war seems to have infected the brains of Western leaders. In a modern cold war, the adversary is no longer a rival nation state competing for resources, power or influence. It is an implacable enemy with an ideology so contrary to one’s own that even the idea of diplomacy becomes unthinkable. “Should we talk?” “Never with those people!”
In the original Cold War, formal intellectual credentials based on binary logic stood in the way of dialogue. It was capitalism vs. communism, two obviously incompatible worldviews. Dialogue could not be entertained for a simple reason: The only imaginable resolution would be capitulation, one side’s conversion to the other’s philosophy of history. And yet, in 1962 and 1963, during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis, US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev did engage in dialogue. Kennedy may even have been ritually “sacrificed” for breaking the unstated rules of the Military-Industrial Complex, recently denounced by JFK’s predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower. As author James Douglass recounts: “Kennedy had taken that leap secretly with Khrushchev while also pledging publicly never to invade Cuba, which infuriated his Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
President George W. Bush welcomed the idea of “global terror” to reassuringly assert that there was a new enemy with whom dialogue would be impossible. Two decades later, President Joe Biden, realizing it might be difficult to assert US military power across the globe without banishing the possibility of dialogue, informed the world that there was an uncrossable barrier between democracies and autocracies. And we all expected to know which were which.
Borrell’s timidity about using the active voice of the verbs he uses to recount what is actually happening in the world tells us that active diplomacy, that in the first two centuries of the era of nation states has now mutated into passive diplomacy at best. The entire Ukraine fiasco provides a perfect example of refused diplomacy.
Borrell doesn’t disagree with Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, who in a piece published by The Palestine Chronicle explains that “the responses in the Western world to the situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank raise a troubling question: why is the official West, and official Western Europe in particular, so indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians?”
In one of his more courageous moments, Borrell states the case in these terms: “For some European countries, historical guilt over the Holocaust has arguably been transformed into a ‘reason of state’ that justifies unconditional support for Israel, risking engaging the EU in complicity with crimes against humanity. One horror cannot justify another. Unless the values the EU claims to uphold are to lose all credibility, the bloc cannot continue to passively observe the unfolding horror in Gaza and the ‘Gazaification’ of the West Bank.”
At this point of his argument, Borrell steps up and accuses his former masters of the crime of passivity when he accuses them of accepting to “passively observe” a very deliberately managed assault on an entire human population, their vital infrastructure and international law. But of course, Europe and the West have done more than passively observe. They continue to support materially and financially a genocide that polite diplomats prefer to think of as a “catastrophe.”