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LAST UPDATE | 23 Jun
Fintan Drury, whose recently published book Catastrophe Nakba II warned that Israel would continue to secure Western support by ‘playing the Iran card’, writes that European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has placed the EU as an unconditional supporter of Israel…
EUROPE’S FOREIGN MINISTERS gathered in Brussels today, where events in Iran — in particular the weekend US bombing of nuclear sites there, as well as Israel’s recent attacks on Iran — certainly dominated discussions.
Representatives were also there to discuss a report on Israel’s breaches of its agreement with the EU, which found that Netanyahu’s government may have fallen short of its human-rights obligations in Gaza under a cooperation deal with Europe. Israel has disputed the findings.
What is clear now, in this current period of geopolitical chaos, is that the European Union has been competing with the United States in a battle to be the most vocal supporter of Israel.
Israel has an ultra-right-wing government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. Its latest military offensive — opening up battle lines with the Islamic Republic — has been met with predictable, and now most worryingly, military support from Donald Trump’s Washington.
When Israel hit Iran in a shock move, and not for the first time, the EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, announced that she’d spoken with Netanyahu and assured him of her support. This, even though she knows well that her office has no role in the European Union’s foreign policy.
When Israel attacked the Iranian capital, Tehran, it warned that it was the start of a campaign to combat the nuclear threat posed by Iran. The rhetoric of Israel’s Netanyahu was, as always, geared to spooking the Islamophobic West, suggesting the attack was necessary, as he put it, “to roll back the Iranian threat to Israel’s very survival.”
It is worth noting that Israel has nuclear weapons and Iran does not. It is also the case that the International Atomic Energy Agency reported Iran’s failure to uphold obligations it had signed as part of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Still, in March, the United States had formally confirmed its belief that Iran was not building nuclear weapons — that assurance coming directly from Donald Trump’s controversial choice of Intelligence chief, Tulsi Gabbard. Of course, in true Trump style, he has since dismissed Gabbard’s assertion, ostensibly to suit his own narrative.
It bears emphasis that Netanyahu first wanted the West to know that Iran was intent on having nuclear arms in 1992, predicting then that it would have the capacity within three to five years. In 1998, he warned the deadline was ‘really close’, in 2003 that its nuclear arms would make it a ‘global threat’, in 2009 that it ‘could have the bomb soon’ and in 2012, 20 years after his first doom-laden prognosis, he announced Iran is one year away from having nuclear bombs.’ Another dozen years later, his VBF, Donald Trump, has now lined up to stand by Bibi.
In von der Leyen’s pretty extraordinary statement following the first attack by Israel, the EU Commission President said that the completely unprovoked attack on Iran had to be seen in the context of its right to self-defence, as ‘Iran is the main source of regional instability.’ It is or should be worrying that her statement was issued following a conversation with the Prime Minister of Israel, who by any reasonable analysis is the most destabilising influence thereabouts, where she presumably had expressed the same sentiments. Netanyahu’s political ego feeds on such nourishment, so he will have been emboldened to continue his campaign. And now, we know that — as with Palestine — it is Iran’s survival at the hands of Israel that is most threatened.
We know the United States will do nothing to rein in Israel. It is easy to see Trump as representing the worst of that toxic political relationship, but Biden’s administration, with Israel’s US cheerleader-in-chief, Anthony Blinken, in control, was every bit as beholden to Netanyahu over the last year of its term.
Britain, too, even with Labour back in power, has acquiesced, as have Germany, France, Canada and Italy, throughout Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza. But what should be alarming for countries like Ireland is how the EU has paraded its institutional support at critical points over the last 20 months.
Later in her statement of support, the EU Commission President said she’d told Netanyahu that the humanitarian situation in Gaza was unacceptable and that aid needed to be allowed through urgently. It was an afterthought; she was so eager to please a political leader wanted by the International Criminal Court that it was certain she would not have pressed him on the matter. That gratuitous line was no more than the standard political box-ticking so evident across much of the West, including Ireland, when it comes to Israel.
It rang particularly hollow with von der Leyen; when it comes to supporting Israel and its rogue government, this is a politician with form. In Catastrophe Nakba II, I write of how keen she was to support Israel’s response to 7 October 2023. The next day, to the fury of many EU employees, she ordered that the Israeli flag be projected onto the Commission’s head office in Brussels before rushing to Tel Aviv to declare Israel’s right to defend itself. Like Biden, that support was unconditional; there were to be no restrictions.
Remarkably, she went further, saying that Hamas was a threat not only to Israel, but also to the Palestinians. The arrogance she has been accused of in the past was on full display, especially as her office has no mandate to speak on international affairs.
The presumptuousness of her behaviour and her remarks caused great alarm in Brussels. The EU’s head of foreign policy, Josep Borrell, the president of the European Council, Charles Michel, and the chair of its security and defence committee, Nathalie Loiseau, quickly reminded Israel of its obligations under international law. Questioning von der Leyen’s motivation, Loiseau asked what she thought she was doing: ‘I don’t understand what the head of the Commission has to do with the EU’s foreign policy, which she is not in charge of.’ The damage to the EU’s standing from the Commission President’s solo run was considerable.
There should be a deep discomfort in Europe at the ease with which the EU has institutionally aligned itself with Israel, revealing that, for all the efforts many member states have made to be inclusive multi-ethnic societies, it will back a state that has made a virtue of the complete opposite. Israel is an apartheid state interested only in a nationhood for one people, one set of beliefs, one ethnicity, and its current government is prepared to murder hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the pursuit of that goal. The United States is not alone in its shameful support of that end; institutionally, the EU faces the same charge.
This was already the case before Israel attacked Iran. Again, it is Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, who used — and possibly overstepped — her office and its status by choosing to back Israel’s military engagement. The implications are profound.
Whatever conditionality she claimed later in her statement, about having addressed the humanitarian consequences of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, the bombardment that she’d endorsed at its outset, her declaration that Iran is “the principal source of regional instability” after Israel had bombed its capital city, again trapped the EU in the pernicious Israeli Zionist web.
The almost uniformly negative assessment of her time as a German government minister, made when she was appointed Commission President, increasingly looks accurate.
Fintan Drury is a former RTÉ journalist, broadcaster and businessman. His book, Catastrophe Nakba II (Merrion Press) is available in all bookstores at €18.99.
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