Netanyahu, who has been issued an International Criminal Court
arrest warrant for war crimes in Gaza, travelled from Israel to the US
on Monday, flying over Greek, Italian and French airspace en route, in
serious violation of these countries’ international legal obligations in
their capacity as State Parties to the Rome Statute.
A former officer of the Israeli Defence forces, Omer Bartov explains
how, for decades Israeli leaders such as Moshe Dayan have made clear
their intention of cleaning the Palestinians out of their ancestral
land. He was dismayed to witness the “transformation of Zionism from an
ideology that sought to liberate the Jews from the degradation of exile
and discrimination and to put them on an equal standing with other
nations of the world, to a state ideology of ethnonationalism,
oppression of others and apartheid.” Nearly a year ago, he wrote
“it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in
systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions.”
Recent events have borne out the truth of his words.
Jewish voices have been prophetic. Addressing Israeli Zionist and fundamentalist extremists in his book In the Land of Israel
nearly half a century ago, the Israeli writer Amos Oz wrote: “When we
look at you from a distance, maybe a little sketchily, we see in you a
dangerous threat to what is dear and sacred to us…..you threaten to boot
Israel out of the union between Jewish tradition and western humanism.
As far as I am concerned, you threaten to push Judaism back through
history, back to the book of Joshua, to the days of the Judges, to the
extreme of tribal factionalism, brutal and closed.”
Messrs Starmer, Macron and Merz seem oblivious to the consequences of
their lack of strategic thinking and loss of moral compass which as
Michael Young, editor of Diwan, Carnegie’s Middle East blog, wrote in May
has “expanded exponentially the margin of countries in the Global South
to turn the tables and denounce their Western inquisitors as
hypocrites”. Beyond the warnings of Omer Bartov and Amos Oz, Young
reminds his readers that Giora Eiland, a former head of Israel’s
National Security Council, described Israel’s choices in this way.
Israel has "to create conditions where life in Gaza becomes
unsustainable…so that the entire population of Gaza will either move to
Egypt or move to the Gulf.’ Ultimately, Gaza must ‘become a place where
no human being can exist.’ Few Israelis anticipated Israel’s ravages in
Gaza more accurately.” All the meantime, European leaders have failed to
stop Israel’s assaults on institutions such as the United Nations and
its bodies that are the pillars of the rules-based international order.
The Global South, Arab governments in particular, were always
suspicious of the EU’s promotion of democracy, particularly after the
outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2011. Now they know for a fact that
international law and humanitarian values are meaningless to most
politicians in European capitals. Young asks “how is it possible for
Ukrainians to enjoy Western sympathy….and now over 2m Gazans are
incapable of sharing such favour?” He is not “sure anymore that the
blank cheque for murder in Gaza hasn’t been related to colour. I say
this because only the dehumanisation of an entire people can explain
Western permissiveness in the face of such an outrage.” Many people in
European societies choose to avert their eyes from Israeli barbarity and
their leaders with a few exceptions such as the Spanish prime minister,
Pedro Sanchez, choose to do the same.
The damage to European credibility is all the greater as it was the
courage and foresight of the Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti
which in 1980 led to the Venice Declaration
in which his European Common Market (as the EU then was) peers first
accepted to support the right of Palestinian people to
self-determination. It was in Madrid in 1991
that the Palestine Liberation Organisation was recognised as
representing the people of Palestine. It was German Chancellor Helmut
Kohl, strategically aware that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
reunification of Germany demanded an equivalent recasting of relations
with countries to the south of Europe who, together with the Spanish
prime minister Felipe Goncalves launched the Barcelona Process
in 1995. The aim of broader economic cooperation between the two shores
of the Mediterranean was predicated on the Oslo Peace negotiations
between Israel and the Palestinians moving forward. History will not
forget that the first stone of the EU’s nascent foreign policy was laid
on a Middle East foundation.
The growing hostility of some Europeans to Israeli actions is
probably too late to save the EU from the lasting damage of Gaza.
European leaders might reflect that the US-Israeli relationship “is
beginning to take on some of the same mutually calamitous aspects as Russia’s commitment to Serbia
in 1914, a great power guarantee which encouraged parts of the Serbian
leadership to behave with criminal irresponsibility in their
encouragement of irredentist claims against Austria, leading to a war
which was ruinous for Russia, Serbia and the world.”. History never
repeats itself but the auguries for an independent European foreign
policy are not encouraging.
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