Josep Borrell

Europe’s silence has allowed the genocide of Palestinians to continue unchecked – undermining all it stands for

• Josep Borrell was the high representative of the EU for foreign affairs and security policy from 2019 to 2024

The Guardian, Fri 1 Aug 2025 10.00 CEST

If they survive Donald Trump’s attacks, the international courts will not deliver their final verdict for several years. But for all those who have ears to hear and eyes to see, there can be little doubt that the Israeli government is committing genocide in Gaza, slaughtering and starving civilians after systematically destroying all the infrastructure in the territory. In the meantime, settlers and the Israeli army are every day guilty of serious, massive and repeated violations of international law and international humanitarian law in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Those who do not act to stop this genocide and these violations of international law, even though they have the power to do so, are complicit in them. This is unfortunately the case with the leaders of the European Union and those of its member states, who refuse to sanction Israel even though the EU has a legal obligation to do so.

The EU has many levers it could pull to exert significant influence on the Israeli government. The EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner and its main partner in investment and people-to-people exchange. It is also one of its major arms suppliers. The association agreement between the EU and Israel, established in 2000 after the Oslo accords, is the most favourable of all those concluded by the bloc with third countries. In addition to zero customs duties on its exports of goods and services and visa-free travel for its citizens, the agreement gives Israel access to several major European funding and exchange programmes such as Horizon and Erasmus.

However, article 2 of this agreement makes it conditional on Israel’s respect for international law and fundamental human rights. Whether or not to suspend it is therefore not a choice that the EU can make at will. Since the EU foreign affairs ministers found that Israel was not respecting these rights, EU leaders now have a legal obligation to suspend the agreement. Failure to do so would also be a serious violation of the association agreement with Israel.

However, despite all my efforts to this end when I was high representative of the EU, and despite the dramatic deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the increasing violations of international law in the West Bank in recent months, the EU and most EU governments have so far failed to use any of the levers available to them to exert pressure on the Israeli government.

As a result, faced with the intransigence of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the EU has for more than a year and a half been unable to assert its commitment to fundamental human rights, its defence of international law and multilateralism, or its longstanding position in favour of the two-state solution. This inaction has already seriously damaged its geopolitical standing, not only in the Muslim world but across the globe. The stark contrast between the firm response of the European authorities to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine and their passivity in the face of the war in Gaza has been widely exploited by Vladimir Putin’s propaganda against the EU. And with success, as we have seen in particular in the Sahel. This European double standard has also greatly weakened support for Ukraine in many developing countries.

By persisting in not suspending the association agreement despite its clear violation by Israel, in not blocking arms deliveries to that country despite the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza, in not banning imports from illegal settlements despite the decisions of the international court of justice to that effect, by not sanctioning Israeli ministers and political leaders who make genocidal statements, by not banning Netanyahu from using European airspace despite the arrest warrant issued by the international criminal court, and by not supporting the judges of the court and UN officials sanctioned by the United States, the EU and its member states are discrediting themselves in the eyes of the world and undermining the international law and multilateral order they are supposed to defend. While under attack from Putin in the east and Trump in the west, the EU is thus deepening its isolation by cutting itself off from the rest of the world.

The leaders of the EU and its member states will probably be called to account in the future for their complicity in the crimes against humanity committed by Netanyahu’s government. And, with hindsight, Europeans will undoubtedly judge harshly their blindness to the genocide that is taking place. However, it is urgent to limit the damage now. The EU must finally decide to sanction Israel without further delay. This is the only language that can bring Israeli leaders to stop committing crimes against humanity.

• Josep Borrell was the high representative of the EU for foreign affairs and security policy from 2019 to 2024. He is president of the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, CIDOB

 The politics of genocide in the United States involves papering over the big gap between the opinions of the electorate and the actions of the U.S. government. While the partnership between the governments of Israel and the United States has never been stronger, the partnership between the people of Israel and the United States has never been weaker. But in the USA, consent of the governed has not been necessary to continue the axis of genocide.

By Norman Solomon, July 28, 2025 

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

For decades, countless U.S. officials have proclaimed that the bonds between the United States and Israel are unbreakable. Now, the ties that bind are laced with genocide. The two countries function as accomplices while methodical killing continues in Gaza, with both societies directly – and differently – making it all possible.

The policies of Israel’s government are aligned with the attitudes of most Jewish Israelis. In a recent survey, three-quarters of them (and 64 percent of all Israelis) said they largely agreed with the statement that “there are no innocent people in Gaza” – nearly half of whom are children.

“There is no more ‘permitted’ and ‘forbidden’ with regard to Israel’s evilness toward the Palestinians,” dissident columnist Gideon Levy wrote three months ago in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “It is permitted to kill dozens of captive detainees and to starve to death an entire people.” The biggest Israeli media outlets echo and amplify sociopathic voices. “Genocide talk has spread into all TV studios as legitimate talk. Former colonels, past members of the defense establishment, sit on panels and call for genocide without batting an eye.”

Last week, Levy provided an update: “The weapon of deliberate starvation is working. The Gaza ‘Humanitarian’ Foundation, in turn, has become a tragic success. Not only have hundreds of Gazans been shot to death while waiting in line for packages distributed by the GHF, but there are others who don’t manage to reach the distribution points, dying of hunger. Most of these are children and babies…. They lie on hospital floors, on bare beds, or carried on donkey carts. These are pictures from hell. In Israel, many people reject these photos, doubting their veracity. Others express their joy and pride on seeing starving babies.”

Unimpeded, a daily process continues to exterminate more and more of the 2.1 million Palestinian people who remain in Gaza – bombing and shooting civilians while blocking all but a pittance of the food and medicine needed to sustain life. After destroying Gaza’s hospitals, Israel is still targeting healthcare workers (killing at least 70 in May and June), as well as first responders and journalists.

The barbarism is in sync with the belief that “no innocent people” are in Gaza. A relevant observation came from Aldous Huxley in 1936, the same year that the swastika went onto Germany’s flag: “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” Kristallnacht happened two years later.

Renowned genocide scholar Omer Bartov explained during an interview on Democracy Now! in mid-July that genocide is “the attempt to destroy not simply people in large numbers, but to destroy them as members of a group. The intent is to destroy the group itself. And it doesn’t mean that you have to kill everyone. It means that the group will be destroyed and that it will not be able to reconstitute itself as a group. And to my mind, this is precisely what Israel is trying to do.”

Bartov, who is Jewish and spent the first half of his life in Israel, said:

“What I see in the Israeli public is an extraordinary indifference by large parts of the public to what Israel is doing and what it’s done in the name of Israeli citizens in Gaza. In part, it has to do with the fact that the Israeli media has decided not to report on the horrors that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] is perpetrating in Gaza. You simply will not see it on Israeli television. If some pictures happen to come in, they are presented only as material that might be used by foreign propaganda against Israel. Now, Israeli citizens can, of course, use other media resources. We can all do that. But most of them prefer not to. And I would say that while about 30 percent of the population in Israel is completely in favor of what is happening, and, in fact, is egging the government and the army on, I think the vast majority of the population simply does not want to know about it.”

In Israel, “compassion for Palestinians is taboo except among a fringe of radical activists,” Adam Shatz wrote last month in the London Review of Books. At the same time, “the catastrophe of the last two years far exceeds that of the Nakba.” The consequences “are already being felt well beyond Gaza: in the West Bank, where Israeli soldiers and settlers have presided over an accelerated campaign of displacement and killing (more than a thousand West Bank Palestinians have been killed since 7 October); inside Israel, where Palestinian citizens are subject to increasing levels of ostracism and intimidation; in the wider region, where Israel has established itself as a new Sparta; and in the rest of the world, where the inability of Western powers to condemn Israel’s conduct – much less bring it to an end – has made a mockery of the rules-based order that they claim to uphold.”

The loudest preaching for a “rules-based order” has come from the U.S. government, which makes and breaks international rules at will. During this century, in the Middle East, the U.S.-Israel duo has vastly outdone all other entities combined in the categories of killing, maiming, and terrorizing. In addition to the joint project of genocide in Gaza, and the USA’s long war on Iraq, the United States and Israel have often exercised an assumed prerogative to attack Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran, along with encore U.S. missile strikes on Iraq as recently as last year.

Israel’s grisly performance as “a new Sparta” in the region is coproduced by the Pentagon, with the military and intelligence operations of the two nations intricately entangled. The Israeli military has been able to turn Gaza into a genocide zone with at least 70 percent of its arsenal coming from the United States.

While writing an afterword about the war on Gaza for the paperback edition of War Made Invisible, I mulled over the relevance of my book’s subtitle: “How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.” As the carnage in Gaza worsened, the reality became clearer that the Orwellian-named Israel Defense Forces and U.S. Defense Department are essentially part of the same military machine. Their command structures are different, but they are part of the same geopolitical Goliath.

“The new era in which Israel, backed by the U.S., dominates the Middle East is likely to see even more violence and instability than in the past,” longtime war correspondent Patrick Cockburn wrote this month. The lethal violence from Israeli-American teamwork is of such magnitude that it epitomizes international state terrorism. The genocide in Gaza shows the lengths to which the alliance is willing and able to go.

While public opinion is very different in Israel and the United States, the genocidal results of the governments’ policies are indistinguishable.

American public opinion about arming Israel is measurable. As early as June 2024, a CBS News poll found that 61 percent of the public said that the U.S. should not “send weapons and supplies to Israel.” Since then, support for Israel has continued to erode.

In sharp contrast, on Capitol Hill, the support for arming Israel is measurably high. When Bernie Sanders’s bills to cut off some military aid to Israel came to a vote last November, just 19 out of 100 senators voted yes. Very few of his colleagues voice anywhere near the extent of Sanders’s moral outrage as he keeps speaking out on the Senate floor.

In the House, only 26 out of 435 members have chosen to become cosponsors of H.R.3565, a bill introduced more than two months ago by Rep. Delia Ramirez that would prevent the U.S. government from sending certain bombs to Israel.

“Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II,” the Congressional Research Service reports. During just the first 12 months after the war on Gaza began in October 2023, Brown University’s Costs of War project found, the “U.S. spending on Israel’s military operations and related U.S operations in the region” added up to $23 billion.

The resulting profit bonanza for U.S. military contractors is notable. So is the fact that the U.S.-Israel partnership exerts great American leverage in the Middle East – where two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves are located.

The politics of genocide in the United States involves papering over the big gap between the opinions of the electorate and the actions of the U.S. government. While the partnership between the governments of Israel and the United States has never been stronger, the partnership between the people of Israel and the United States has never been weaker. But in the USA, consent of the governed has not been necessary to continue the axis of genocide.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, includes an afterword about the Gaza war.

Editorial

Condemnation is rightly growing. But until concrete action is taken, western allies will remain complicit with these horrifying crimes

Wed 23 Jul 2025 19.53 CEST

July has been one of the deadliest months of the war in Gaza, with Israel killing one person every 12 minutes. The UN says more than 1,000 Palestinians have died trying to get food, mostly when they attempted to collect aid from hubs.

Behind these visible deaths lies the horror of systematic starvation: “minutely engineered, closely monitored, precisely designed”, in the words of Prof Alex de Waal, an expert on humanitarian crises. More than 100 aid groups warned that it is spreading fast. At least 10 people died of hunger and malnutrition on Tuesday alone, said Gaza’s health ministry. Parents watch their children wither. Adults collapse on the street.

Never mind other essential needs – water, medical supplies, shelter. Even if food could be distributed fairly under the new system – and it cannot be – it is utterly insufficient. And even if more arrived, which might or might not happen if a ceasefire were agreed, life is not sustainable when brief periods of partial respite alternate with months of deprivation.

Starvation wreaks lifelong damage on physical and mental health, perhaps including that of future generations, and destroys societies as well as lives. People are forced to make impossible choices, such as deciding which of their children needs food most, and do desperate things, snatching food from others. These acts too leave lasting scars. While many aid groups have run out of everything, others say social breakdown has made distributing meagre supplies too dangerous for both staff and recipients. Israel blames looting by Hamas for the hunger. This, from a government which armed a criminal gang accused of seizing aid.

To deliberately inflict starvation upon a society is to take it to pieces. The genocide convention prohibits “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. Even if the trickle of aid keeps most Palestinians alive – just – the deprivation can still destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a group.

Condemnation is rightly growing. On Monday, the UK and 27 other countries issued a tough statement attacking Israel for depriving Palestinians of “human dignity”. The US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, called their assertion “disgusting”. But Israel’s other allies must keep working together. What matters is not what they say. It is what they do – including whether they impose sanctions and comprehensive arms embargos, and suspend preferential trade terms. Recognition of a Palestinian state is part of a necessary response, but not the only or most important issue.

Britain was right to place sanctions on far-right ministers, reinstate funding to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, and suspend many arms exports. But these measures came too late, and they are still much too little. Kaja Kallas, the foreign policy chief of the EU – Israel’s biggest trading partner – has said that “all options [are] on the table”. But the bloc has yet to agree on action.

Faced with the systematic destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, other states must together produce a systematic, comprehensive and concrete response. If not now, when? What more would it take to convince them? This is first and foremost a catastrophe for Palestinians. But if states continue to allow international humanitarian law to be shredded, the repercussions will be felt by many more around the world in years to come. History will not ask whether these governments did anything to stop genocide by an ally, but whether they did all they could.

Ammiel Alcalay

Published date: 22 July 2025

Israel’s killing of starving Palestinians is built on a global order that has normalised the spectacle of violence, the silencing of dissent and the punishment of those who dare to resist

Palestinians, mostly children, push to receive a hot meal at a charity kitchen in the Mawasi area of Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on 22 July, 2025 (AFP)

A grim and powerful act of protest has taken place in Gaza.

In the midst of the Israeli–US-imposed blockade on food and humanitarian aid – a policy that has already caused many Palestinians to die – a significant public figure has himself gone on hunger strike.

On Sunday, 20 July, Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza and long persecuted by the Israeli occupation for documenting conditions on the ground, announced a hunger strike.

“I am Mahmoud Basal, a Palestinian citizen, a free human being,” he declared. “For days now, I have been living on scraps of food, like more than two million citizens. Due to the lack of basic food in the Gaza Strip, I declare a full hunger strike in protest against the catastrophic famine striking Gaza, and in solidarity with more than two million people who have been left to face death by starvation amid shameful global silence.”

While Israel has long used food as a weapon – measuring out the bare minimum number of calories required to keep Gaza’s population on the brink of malnutrition – we are now witnessing the radical consequences of restrictions and blockades that have been normalised over decades.

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This strategy was infamously outlined in a 2008 Israeli position paper, Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip – Red Lines.

‘Unbearable loss’

Incremental yet relentless waves of dehumanising propaganda in western media and political discourse, reinforced by repeated Israeli assaults on Gaza that leave mass death and devastation in their wake, have brought us to the horrific present reality.

Now, Israeli forces target unarmed, starving people in search of food using snipers, artillery and drones – people who are then presented not as victims, but as trespassers on their own land.

Relentless propaganda and repeated Israeli assaults have brought us to this horrific present reality

On the same day Basal announced his hunger strike, poet and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mosab Abu Toha – displaced from his destroyed home in Beit Lahia to Egypt and, eventually, the US – posted on X: “Today was a day of unbearable loss. My cousin was killed, my wife’s brother and another cousin were wounded, and many of my friends from the neighbourhood returned with amputated limbs. These were young men – sons, fathers – who had to set out, desperate to bring back even a little food for their families.”

While Israel foments further chaos in Syria and Lebanon to divert attention and consolidate territorial control – part of a meticulously planned attempt to fully dominate the region – British surgeon Nick Maynard has reported consistent patterns of gunshot injuries at newly established aid distribution sites.

Noting “clear patterns of injury”, Dr Maynard described victims – mainly teenage boys – as being deliberately targeted in different parts of the body, depending on the day.

“On one day they’ll all be abdominal gunshot wounds, on another they’ll all be head or neck gunshot wounds, on another they’ll be arm or leg gunshot wounds…It’s almost as if a game is being played, that they’re deciding to shoot the head today, the neck tomorrow, the testicles the day after,” he said. 

Campus complicity

Meanwhile, in the US, the news cycle functions as a constant distraction – through contrived political scandals, economic chaos driven by the tariff mood of the day, or congressional hearings on “antisemitism” at US universities.

At these show trials, the university administrators summoned for questioning are themselves among the institutional actors who have hollowed out academia to its core.

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Research fields that develop the technical means to kill and control populations that resist, while manufacturing consent for those very policies, receive institutional priority due to corporate sponsorship.

Yet these same administrators stand accused of not doing enough to ban, silence, arrest, or otherwise suppress any expression of free speech on campus – so long as that speech supports Palestinian liberation or criticises US or Israeli policy.

All of this reinforces the false dichotomies of US institutional discourse – as if most, if not all, institutions were not aligned with the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy.

Like a deer in headlights, Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez of the City University of New York (CUNY) feigned ignorance under Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s relentless interrogation, repeatedly claiming he “wasn’t aware of” or “did not know about” this or that individual or event.

Yet even before the hearings, and in hopes of appeasing the insatiable bloodlust of genocide denial, Rodriguez had already offered up four contingent CUNY professors – the most precarious segment of academic labour – as sacrificial lambs, ensuring their dismissal without cause due to their involvement in Palestine-related activism.

How did we get here?

Fading empires

The famine in Yemen, a result of the US-supported Saudi intervention and blockade that began in 2016, was neither live-streamed nor regarded as a significant component of US foreign policy.

Thus, the steadfast support of Ansar Allah, Yemen’s armed Houthi movement, for Gaza and Palestine can be made to seem “irrational” – as though there were no link between past atrocities and present resistance.

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As global power shifts towards multipolarity, and new alliances form along emergent trade routes, the US and EU have entered a phase of panic familiar to fading empires.

The years leading up to the sudden outbreak of the coronavirus in 2020 were characterised by some of the most massive public displays of political protest across the globe since the 1960s.

From the Great March of Return in Gaza and the Algerian Hirak, to mass uprisings in Iraq, Lebanon’s 17 October popular uprising, the Yellow Vests in France, and demonstrations in Catalonia, Chile, Hong Kong and beyond, the world seemed on fire.

But those determined to maintain power were often more attuned to the global resonances between these movements than many of the participants themselves.

New feudal order

As with the post-9/11 moment, the policies enacted in response to the pandemic reshaped societies almost overnight: restricting basic human rituals, from funerals to visiting the sick and elderly, while enabling massive wealth transfers.

People were taught to fear one another – to fear contact, proximity and community. New digital powers and the complete relativising of the principles of free speech and unrestrained movement transformed societies almost overnight.

Changes in civil liberties, economies, supply chains, trade routes – and almost every aspect of life – seemed to bring the future, so to speak, back to the past.

There is no justification for starving and killing Palestinians in Gaza – and claiming it can’t be stopped is a lie of the highest magnitude

That past is also the Cold War past that liberal democracies and a fading US empire continue to cling to, propped up by the perpetual manufacture of existential enemies.

In 1944, anthropologist Gregory Bateson – then working for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA – remarked: “It is very important to sponsor spectatorship among the superiors and exhibitionism among the inferiors.”

Historically denied the means to defend themselves by far more powerful states, the present anguish of unarmed Palestinians searching for food to survive yet another day – in a world that has betrayed them on every front – is a harbinger to all rational people with eyes to see, ears to hear, and minds to think, as we enter a new feudal order.

There is no justification whatsoever for the forced starvation and wanton killing of Palestinians in Gaza, now or ever. And the idea that mechanisms to stop it are unavailable or do not exist is a lie of the highest magnitude.

The day after Basal’s declaration, a young Egyptian activist at the Hague chained shut the Egyptian embassy gates, scattered flour across the pavement, and smashed eggs against the entrance in protest. In that moment of small, defiant spectacle, a whole edifice of lies appeared to fall apart.

The only conclusion we can draw is that we are witnessing a deliberate effort to showcase the impunity of power, an effort designed to annihilate the very possibility of political reciprocity, justice and law.

This monstrosity must be defeated, at any cost – and everything must be remembered, in fine detail, to hold those responsible to account.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Ammiel Alcalay is a poet, novelist, translator, essayist, critic and scholar. He is the author of more than 25 books, most recently Controlled Demolition: a work in four books, and his co-translation of Nasser Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece. He is Distinguished Professor at Queens College, CUNY, and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.