The European bankruptcy in Gaza
The European Union has become a completely irrelevant player in the Middle East. Disunited to the point of having no concrete proposal to stop the war in Gaza, and uncritical to the point of validating with its silence the total destruction of the Strip and the war crimes being committed. The official language of every declaration of "concern," every call for "restraint" in Israel, is the portrait of a deliberate failure. This is the measure of how political agendas and priorities have changed in an EU that had always claimed to be the largest donor of aid to Palestine and today has nothing to offer it.
Omar Shaban, a member of Pal-Think for Strategic Studies, an independent center in Gaza, railed against this passivity on Saturday in Barcelona, at a conference organized by Cidob. "Before the war, representatives of the European Union came and talked to us about human rights and the Geneva Convention... What will they talk to us about tomorrow?" French diplomat Gérard Araud, former ambassador to Israel and now a researcher at the Atlantic Council, who was participating in the same conference, echoed this disappointment with a Europe that has lost all "moral right" to go around the world talking about human rights, because "they'll laugh in our faces" and remind us of Gaza. Even Josep Borrell, the former High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and new president of CIDOB (National Council of People's Commissars), acknowledged the double standards of an EU in which "the dead in Gaza don't count as much as those in Ukraine."
This gap between the two wars shaking the Union's eastern and southern neighborhoods has widened even further in the new European political cycle. The shadow of complicity has grown uncomfortably wider. This is reflected in the few dozen civil servants who still demonstrate silently at lunchtime in front of the Commission building calling for "peace and justice."
On Saturday, the Palestinian Red Crescent released a video of more than 6 minutes recorded inside one of the vehicles attacked on March 23 by the Israeli army. The images and autopsies confirm that the fifteen paramedics and civilian emergency personnel, one of them a UN worker, were killed and buried in a foundry beneath the sand in Rafah. According to the Israeli army, it was an operation against terrorists, but the evidence contradicts this. A daily massacre almost normalized in the narrative of a war that appears and disappears from the headlines.
The ceasefire in Gaza has broken down, and the world has once again looked the other way. Experts warn of the effect that the brutality of the destruction can have on radicalization in the region, but the immediate agendas are set.
The Indian writer Pankaj Mishra, recently published The world after Gaza, denounced this "absence of any ethical restraint" last week in Barcelona. The imposition of a world in which "might makes right" and the use of force is acceptable. "In the destruction of Gaza and Western support for these massacres, we see the logic of these changes" which, according to Mishra, hold up a mirror to the chronic illness our societies suffer: from painful indifference to contempt for the rights and principles approved, precisely, to restore reason in a world that had already been devastated.
The display of force is a rising currency today. That's why Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu displayed the strength of their alliance at the White House this Monday. Similarly, Viktor Orbán, who has made irredentism a political strategy, announced last Thursday that Hungary was leaving the International Criminal Court, and he said so accompanied by the Israeli prime minister after receiving him with full honors, flouting the arrest warrant issued for Netanyahu. Orbán thus challenges not only international law but also its commitment to a weak European Union.
A few months ago, the until recently EU Special Representative for the Middle East, Sven Koopmans, demanded at a meeting with students that Europe "needs a plan and not just a wait-and-see approach." But without a plan, and without a voice, the EU clings to the poor language of containment in a conflict that is concentrating the collapse of that international order into an accelerating crisis.