“Nobody is going to listen to us ever again when we go around telling others to respect human rights and international law”: the EU’s former head gardenerchief diplomat, Josep Borrell.
After 659 days of gradually intensifying genocide in Gaza, live-streamed around the world every minute of every day, depressingly few countries have taken anything approaching meaningful action against the country directly perpetrating the genocide. Almost all of them are in the so-called “Global South”. They include Colombia whose Gustavo Petro government was one of the first to break off diplomatic ties with Israel, in May 2024.
As we noted at the time, the move was not without its share of risks, given: a) Colombia is one of Washington’s longest standing vassal states in Latin America and is home to at least seven US military bases; and b) the historic role Israel has played not only arming Colombia’s security forces but also in training its paramilitary groups, which killed more citizens than the guerrillas in the decades-long Civil War, according to Colombia’s Truth Commission.
The Petro government’s next move was to become one of the first — and only — national governments to try to impose economic sanctions against Israel in response to its war crimes in Gaza. Not only did it suspend all purchases of Israeli weaponry, it also blocked all sales of Colombian coal to Israel.
“Colombian coal is used to manufacture bombs that kill Palestinian children,” Petro said to justify the move, which was not without its critics at home.
Corporate Sanction Busters
That was on August 14, 2024. Yet according to recent reports, Colombian coal continues to flow from El Cerrejón, a huge open air mine in northern Colombia, to Israel. In an address before Congress to mark the 215th anniversary of Colombia’s independence last Sunday, Petro accused two global mining companies — Swiss-based Glencore and Birmingham, Alabama-based Drummond — of continuing to export Colombian coal to Israel despite the export ban.
Petro insists that officials in his own government, including the former Minister of Industry and Commerce, Luis Carlos Reyes, contravened his presidential decree. For his part, Reyes claims that Petro knew all along that the decree included sufficient loopholes and wriggle room to allow transnational companies to continue sending Colombian coal to Israel, and is now using his as a fall guy.
For the moment, it is unclear who is telling the truth. One thing that is clear is that the shipments of Colombian coal to Israel have continued, albeit in lower volumes. According to Colombia’s National Mining Association, “since the entry into force of the ban on exports to Israel, sales of Colombian coal have fallen from 250,000 to 100,000 tons per month.”
This more or less coincides with the testimony of Igor Díaz, a representative of the Sintracarbón mining union who told El País that at least three ships have set sail from Colombia without authorisation, one belonging to Glencore and two to Drummond.
Last Thursday, Petro ordered the Colombian Navy to stop any ships sailing from any Colombian port with coal to Israel. He also called on the Wayuu indigenous authorities along Colombia’s Caribbean coastline and other peoples affected by coal exploitation to block all mining activity at the El Cerrejón, one of the world’s largest open-air mines, if shipments of coal continue to leave for Israel.
“I have ordered that not a single ton of coal will be sent to Israel,” Petro said. “Colombia will not be complicit in genocide.”
A Corporate-Sponsored Genocide
The same cannot be said of Glencore and Drummond. Both are among 60 companies featured in the report, “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide”, published by the United Nation’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese.
Albanese argues that western companies have been under a legal and moral obligation to break ties with Israel’s system of occupation since last summer when the ICJ ruledthat Israel’s decades-old occupation was a criminal enterprise based on apartheid and forcible transfer.
As the British journalist and author Jonathan Cook reports in his article, “Israel’s Genocide Is Big Business – and the Face of the Future“, many of the foreign companies operating in Israel have responded to the allegations by claiming that “this was Israel’s responsibility, not theirs, or that it was for states, not international law, to regulate their business activities.”
The dozens of high-profile businesses identified in Albanese’s report represent an array of sectors, from tech (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, and IBM, again supporting genocide, this time by providing Israel with biometric databases) to automotive (Volvo, Hyundai), to energy (BP, Chevron), finance (Barclays, BNP Paribas) and mining (Glencore, Drummond). As Cook notes, they are all profiting from Israel’s crimes in Gaza:
In an interview with US journalist Chris Hedges, Albanese, an expert in international law, concluded: “The genocide in Gaza has not stopped, because it is lucrative. It’s profitable for far too many.”
Albanese lists dozens of major western companies that are deeply invested in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
This is not a new development, as she notes. These firms have exploited business opportunities associated with Israel’s violent occupation of the Palestinian people’s lands for years, and in some cases decades.
The switch from Israel’s occupation of Gaza to its current genocide hasn’t threatened profits; it has enhanced them. Or as Albanese puts it: “The profits have increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”
The special rapporteur has been a growing thorn in the side of Israel and its western sponsors over the past 21 months of slaughter in Gaza.
That explains why Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, announced soon after her report was issued that he was imposing sanctions on Albanese for her efforts to shed light on the crimes of Israeli and US officials.
Revealingly, he called her statements – rooted in international law – “economic warfare against the United States and Israel”. Albanese and the UN system of universal human rights that stands behind her, it seems, represent a threat to western profiteering.
13 Countries Take On Israel
Albanese was recently in Bogota to attend a gathering with representatives of more than 30 states seeking to develop an emergency plan for stopping Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza and the West Bank. The meeting was convened by the “Hague Group”, a bloc of nations co-founded in January by officials from several countries in the Global South, including South Africa and Colombia. The group aims to ensure compliance with the sentences handed down against Israel by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
In her speech Albanese called on all States to suspend their ties with Israel:
The occupied Palestinian territory is now a living hell. In Gaza, Israel has dismantled even the UN’s last function – humanitarian aid – in order to starve, repeatedly displace, or deliberately murder a population it has marked for elimination. In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, ethnic cleansing is proceeding through illegal siege, mass displacement, extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests and widespread torture. In all areas under Israeli rule, Palestinians live under the terror of annihilation, broadcast in real time to a watching world.
The Hague Group has two chairs — Colombia and South Africa — and six members: Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia and Senegal. But the Bogota conference drew delegates from 32 nations, including China, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Turkey, Egypt and Qatar.
The only Collective West countries in attendance were Spain, Ireland, Slovenia. None of them featured among the 13 States (Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Nicaragua, Oman, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, South Africa, and Türkiye) that ratified measures aimed at blocking the transfer of weapons and other military equipment to Israel through their respective territories and upholding universal jurisdiction mandates in order to ensure justice for victims of Israel’s crimes in Palestine.
Admittedly, 13 countries out of 193 is a pathetically small number given the breathtaking array and gravity of war crimes Israel has committed in Gaza — including the worst of all, genocide — over the past 659 days. But it is something.
Of course, these 13 (mostly smallish) countries will have their work cut out preventing Israel from sourcing weapons for its ongoing genocide in Gaza and expansionary wars in the Middle East. As Colombia’s recent experience shows, it’s one thing to try to impose sanctions on Israel; it’s a whole other thing to enforce them.
But at least the intention is there and more countries may sign on. The Houthis have certainly made their stand. Grassroots resistance is also on the rise as port workers in Europe refuse to service ships bound for Israel while in Greece citizens bar the disembarkation of Israeli tourists. As Yves pointed out a few days ago, Israel is increasingly subject to a death of a thousand cuts.
Yet to my knowledge, not a single collective West nation has taken any action to prevent the provision or transfer of arms to, or the purchase of arms from, Israel. Ireland, to its credit, did recently become the first EU country to ban trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. And the EU has placed certain sanctions on individuals and business entities connected to Israel’s illegal settlements.
Spain’s Pedro Sánchez government has talked a good game, even going so far as to recognise Palestinian statehood late last year. It also participated in the conference organised by the Hague Group, for which it faced criticism in parts of the Spanish press, mainly for participating in a forum alongside “some of the worst dictatorships on earth – such as those of Cuba and Nicaragua” — and in which none of the “great democracies” of the West participated, as if that were proof of the event’s irrelevance rather than the West’s moral bankruptcy.
Yet Spain was also the biggest buyer of Israeli arms and ammunition from February to May, accounting for 78% of all EU purchases. As EC Saharawi notes, “despite global calls [for countries] to cut ties with Israel’s military industry, more than 50% of Israel’s military exports went to Europe. In other words, while the violence is publicly condemned, the machinery behind it is still being financed.”
In the interests of balance, it’s not just Western states that are guilty of inaction or complicity. The leaders of most Arab countries have vociferously condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza while at the same maintaining close ties with the state of Israel.
Despite positioning themselves as leading defenders of the Global South, neither Russia nor China have cut their diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv or imposed economic sanctions against Israel. Indeed, Beijing recently sought to strengthen its economic ties with Tel Aviv while Chinese companies and workers are allegedly helping to sustain Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Even in times of genocide, business is business.
Of course, no one bears as much responsibility for aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide as the US, regardless of who is in power. But even in the US Israel is rapidly losing support as the stark reality of genocide becomes undeniable.
Back in Europe, the governments of France and the UK have issued stronger statements of late, including occasional mutterings about recognising Palestine (now that Israel is systematically destroying it). But it amounts to little more than legal-ass covering. Unlike the US and Israel, most Western European countries — including Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain — are signatories to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, or ICC.
In the case of the UK, the government and armed forces continue to provide military, logistic and intelligence support for Israel’s actions in Gaza even as the public outcry grows. Like many other European states, it is intensifying its legal crackdown on supporters of Palestine. Former Labour MP Zarah Sultana recently accused the UK Premier Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, of war crimes.
EU “Loses Its Soul in Gaza”
The EU, meanwhile, is apparently “assessing its options” after finding Israel in breach of human rights obligations under an association agreement between the bloc and Israel. EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, one of Europe’s biggest cheerleaders for Israel’s bloodbath in Gaza, claims to have finally found a conscience.
“Civilians cannot be targets,” VDL says. The Gazans “have suffered too much, for too long.”
“So little, so late”, says Albanese.
EU foreign ministers are reportedly scheduled to discuss potential consequences during a meeting next month while hundreds of thousands of Gazans face starvation in the days and weeks ahead. The resulting damage to Europe’s already weakened standing in the word is likely to be brutal, warns Albanese:
As a European, I fear what the region and its institutions have come to symbolize for many: a brotherhood of states that preach international law, but are guided more by a colonial mentality than by principle, acting as vassals of the United States empire, even as it drags us from war to war, from misery to misery, and, as far as Palestine is concerned, from silence to complicity.
That complicity is likely to continue, if not intensify in the coming months, given that the EU just prostrated itself before the US by signing one of the most one-sided trade deals in modern history. VdL, once dubbed by Politico as “Europe’s most American president”, has over-delivered for Washington once again.
Even former senior Eurocrats are beginning to lament Brussels’ loss of power and influence on the global stage. The bloc’s former chief diplomat/head gardener, Josep Borrell, said in a recent interview with Spain’s Canal SER that Europe has lost its soul in Gaza. The interviewer then ask, rather bizarrely, “what else has Europe lost?”, to which Borrell responded, “You don’t think losing your soul is enough?” He then said:
To lose respect. To lose the capacity to talk about human rights. Nobody is going to listen to us ever again when we go around telling others to respect human rights and international law.
As a committed Europhile and as a European citizen, it causes me great sadness to see Europe’s reaction to [what is happening in Gaza]. I don’t understand how there are still countries… sending weapons to Israel so that it can continue killing thousands of children in Gaza.
Now, it’s not so much about the bombs being dropped, it’s about — as one Israeli minister put it — not letting a single grain of wheat into Gaza. There are 6,000 trucks — and I have seen them — loaded with food waiting to enter Gaza, and on the other side there are two million people starving to death.
Borrell laments the EU’s inevitable loss of influence on the global stage while most countries will probably breathe a long sigh of relief. He also speaks like somebody who was powerless to affect EU policy towards Israel yet he was High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy during the first 400 or so days of Israel’s “Gazacide”.
As we have been asking since Jan 2024, why are so few countries willing to take action against Israel? The possibilities are myriad — the power of Israeli lobbies in the US and Europe, pressure from Washington, Israel’s strategic role as colonial attack dog in the Middle East, the wide reach of NSO’s Pegasus software and the blackmailing of lawmakers through honeytraps like Epstein’s — but one seems to overshadow all the others: Israel’s vital importance to the war and surveillance industry.
As Cook writes, “Israel – the world’s biggest incubator for the arms and surveillance industries – is simply too big and too important to be allowed to fail. Even as it commits genocide”.