It comes in cycles. Faced with every geopolitical crisis, the irrelevance of the European Union has been highlighted time and again. But what role, in recent history, has the EU played, or tried to play, in the Middle East and, in particular, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
It is worth starting by looking at the European attempts at developing a foreign policy from the very beginning. The European Economic Community (EEC), which initially consisted of six countries, although it aspired to more ambitious goals, was initially based on the sharing of raw materials, such as coal and steel. It then devoted itself to the construction of the Common Market; consequently, it had no role in the field of foreign relations for the entire initial period. It was in 1969 that, under the impetus of the Belgian diplomat Étienne Davignon, a first working group was formed, composed of six political advisors to the EEC Foreign Ministers. Chaired by Davignon himself, it sought closer political cooperation, also in view of the enlargements that started in 1973 with the accession of the United Kingdom, Denmark and Ireland.
The first report, named after Davignon, was approved by the EEC Council of Foreign Ministers in 1970; it provided for consultations in order to produce common positions in the field of foreign policy with the exclusion of defence and security policy. For this purpose, six-monthly meetings of the foreign ministers and quarterly meetings of their political advisors were scheduled, with the establishment of a permanent secretariat. The consultation among ministers was open to the participation of the EEC Commission, and the deliberations were forwarded for information to the Political Affairs Committee of the European Parliament, which was not yet chosen by the popular vote.
The first meeting of ministers took place in Munich in November 1970 and the consultation procedure assumed the official status of European Political Cooperation (EPC). It was the embryo of what only in 1993, with the Maastricht Treaty, would become the CFSP (Common Foreign and Security Policy). At the Munich meeting (three years after the Six-Day War), the main discussion was about organisational issues.
The Six-Day War
Immediately after the Six-Day War, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 242 which was based on the principle of ‘land for peace’. At the time, it was not accepted by the Palestinians. There followed a period in which Israel did not seem to want to implement the content of that resolution and, consequently, the process of returning the territories which it had occupied, while in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, colonisation with the first settlements began. Egypt pressed for the implementation of the resolution, going so far — after repeated threats — as a military strike against Israel in alliance with Syria, in what was called the ‘Yom Kippur’ War. This was a surprise attack, on the day of ‘atonement’ in which, after initial disarray, Israel fought back with an operation that succeeded to the point of surrounding the Egyptian Third Army, which led to the suspension of the fighting. Again, the UN Security Council reacted with a resolution, number 338 of 1973, calling for a ‘ceasefire’ and the start of negotiations.
It was after these events that, at the Copenhagen Summit in 1973, for the first time the EEC’s nine member states took a common position on the Middle East conflict with the above-mentioned UN resolutions as a reference. Another important stance was the one taken by the European Council at its meeting in London on 29-30 June 1977, which devoted considerable space to the Middle East conflict. Referring once again to the UN resolutions, it advocated a peace solution based on Israel’s withdrawal from the territories occupied in 1967, respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of every state in the region, and recognition of the Palestinians’ legitimate rights, including the right to participate in peace negotiations.
In Copenhagen on 7-8 April 1978, the European Council returned its focus to the Middle East by deploring Israel’s armed intervention in Lebanon (the first) in 1978, citing UN Resolutions 425 and 426 and reiterating the European position taken the previous year in London. Faced with the stalemate, the Council returned to the issue at its meeting in Bremen on 18 July 1978.
1978 was the year of the Camp David agreements with the Peace Treaty between Israel and Egypt, strongly desired by the US, in which Egypt obtained the restitution of Sinai but did not agree to return to Gaza, probably so as not to increase the conflict with the Palestinians, already disappointed by that separate agreement. From then on, the Palestinian cause was no longer straightforwardly identifiable with that of the Arab countries, insofar as it ever had been.
The Venice Declaration
The peace reached between Israel and Egypt did not, of course, mark an end to the conflict between Israel and its neighbours — and above all, it backfired on the Palestinian people. Faced with this situation, at the meeting of the European Council in Venice on 12-13 June 1980, the nine member states approved the Venice Declaration, in which they resolutely affirmed the need for the European Community to play a role in building peace in the Middle East. Recalling the principles indicated in the previous declarations, other principles were also added, deemed useful to an effective and sustainable peace process. These included: the recognition of the existence of the Palestinian people and its right to self-determination; the impossibility of unilaterally changing the status of Jerusalem and the insistence that any agreement on the city must guarantee free access to holy sites for all; the illegality of settlements in the occupied territories and population transfers; and the call to stop the practice of altering property rights, considered illegal under international law .
In response, a few weeks later, on 30 July 1980, the Knesset, with a law of constitutional standing, declared the ‘united’ Jerusalem to be the capital of the State of Israel. This law was, however, rejected by the Israeli Supreme Court and declared null and void by UN Security Council Resolution 478.
On 6 June 1982, Israel invaded South Lebanon, prompting the European Council to take a new position at its meeting in Brussels on 28-29 June 1982. Here, it called for the immediate withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanese territory and emphasised the need for negotiations, in which the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) would have to participate. Not only did the occupation continue, but between 16 and 18 September 1982, one of the most appalling episodes in the tormented history of the Middle East took place: the massacre of more than three thousand civilians, most of them Palestinians, in the Sabra district and the Palestinian refugee camp in Shatila, on the outskirts of Beirut. This massacre was perpetrated by Lebanese Christian Phalangists with the cover and complicity of the Israeli army. This happened a month after the PLO leadership had been expelled from Lebanon, where it had settled following the events of Black September. Eliminating the Palestinians from Lebanon was, for Ariel Sharon, a decisive strategic step in the geopolitical design of having a Christian Lebanon as a neighbour, a natural ally against the other Arab states.
If one wants to look for a precedent to Hamas’s inhuman attack against Israeli civilians last October 7, the most fitting one, in terms of the heinousness and the techniques used in the extermination of defenceless people, was that of Sabra and Shatila. It took place in a different time and in a different context, yet mirrored the carnage later perpetrated by Hamas.
After Sabra and Shatila
The UN immediately reacted to these killings; on 19 September 1982, the Security Council approved resolution 521 in which, in addition to issuing its condemnation, it decided to send observers and proposed — in agreement with the Lebanese government — the deployment of a peacekeeping contingent. Since the timeframe to make this last decision operational was not immediate, French president François Mitterrand took the initiative to send a multinational force composed of French, US and Italian soldiers to Lebanon.
The European Council was, however, silent. At their meeting in Brussels on 22-23 March 1983, the European governments, ‘alarmed’ by the lack of progress in the Arab-Israeli conflict, called for the withdrawal of all foreign troops from Lebanon, be they Israeli, Syrian, or PLO forces. They called on all parties to start peace negotiations. ‘Above all, the time has come for Israel to show that it is willing to accept genuine negotiations on the basis of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, primarily by refraining from expanding existing settlements or creating new ones. The Ten [EEC member states] reaffirm that settlements are contrary to international law and also constitute a major and growing obstacle to peace efforts’.
In 1986, with the Single European Act, the Secretariat General of European Political Cooperation (EPC) was placed under the authority of the president of the Council and finally gained a legal basis for its operations. Yet from its very first steps, the intrinsic weakness of this cooperation was evident, as it had no instruments to translate its positions into political acts and, moreover, was reined in by different, often divergent national policies. This latter problem has persisted to the present day, despite subsequent institutional developments. As a consequence, the ‘common positions’ taken, the result of exhausting mediation processes, represented the ‘lowest common denominator’ approach — and had little impact.
The First Intifada
In December 1987, the First Intifada broke out. In 1988, the Palestinian Declaration of Independence was proclaimed, with Yasser Arafat later becoming president. Between 1988 and 1989, Mitterrand launched an intense diplomatic offensive; he received Arafat in Paris twice, and also twice received the Israeli premier Yitzhak Shamir; he elevated the PLO representation in Paris to the rank of General Delegation of Palestine. He obtained an important result on the Palestinian side: on 15 November 1988, the Palestinian National Council voted to recognise UN Resolutions 242 and 338; it thus recognised the legitimacy of the state of Israel alongside a Palestinian state.
The European Council held in Madrid on 26-27 June 1989 again wearily repeated its positions for peace in the Middle East, welcomed the Palestinian decision to recognise Israel’s right to exist, and spoke out in favour of elections in the occupied territories. Once again, these were positions that had no concrete impact on the reality of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Still, it is also worth noting that in the two decades following the Six-Day War, the European Community was capable of adopting positions that today’s European Union would have great difficulty in taking.
One need only compare the complete adherence to UN positions in that period with the cacophony of European reactions to the UN Secretary-General’s statements on the tragedy in Gaza. One cannot escape the fact that the Security Council resolutions of those years, in the midst of the Cold War, were passed with the votes of both the United States and the Soviet Union (a great supporter of the birth of Israel). All that remains is the banal, albeit true, observation that everything has changed: the UN has changed, the USSR is no more, the USA has changed and, unfortunately, Europe has changed.
Conversely, the ineffectiveness of those courageous positions — in addition to what has already been said about the total unwillingness of the member states (then and now) to even a partial cession of sovereignty in the field of foreign policy — should also be attributed to the fact that in those years, especially in the decade marked by Jacques Delors’ presidency of the European Commission, the Community and then the European Union was mainly committed to the internal front of integration: the single market, the euro, territorial and social cohesion. The Commission’s focus on the Middle East was, above all, based on the so-called Global Mediterranean Policy, addressed to the so-called Mediterranean third countries: meaning, the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia) and the Mashreq (Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon), Cyprus and Malta (which were not yet member-states) and Yugoslavia; but not Israel, with which the EU would later establish an Association Agreement within the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership. The Global Mediterranean Policy brought trade agreements with each such state, to facilitate access to the Community for their agricultural products, along with a small development-aid component.
The Madrid Conference and the fall of the USSR
Europe’s lack of political clout on the Middle East question became blatantly apparent at the Madrid Conference, co-sponsored by the United States and the Soviet Union, which took place from 30 October to 1 November 1991, only two months after the dissolution of the USSR, and in which the European Community participated as an external ‘observer’. Madrid was the beginning of a long path of negotiations that, to date, has produced no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflicts. In Madrid, the formula of direct relations between Israel and individual Arab countries was introduced — these relations having hitherto relied on ‘mediators’.
The Arab countries were divided among themselves and the Palestinian delegation was not admitted because Arafat’s PLO was considered by Israel to be a terrorist group. As a result, some Palestinians were allowed to be part of Jordan’s delegation, without any legitimate standing to negotiate anything. Yet even given these assumptions, the new development was that this provided a framework for the initiation of the peace agreement between Israel and Jordan, which was later stipulated in 1994.
In the two decades following the Six-Day War, the European Community was capable of adopting positions that today’s European Union would have great difficulty in taking.
Another hardly secondary element of the change in the world scenario was the position of the newly formed Russian Federation, which in January 1992 resumed the diplomatic relations with Israel that the USSR had broken off in 1967. The axis between Russia and the Arab countries was broken, also due to the fact that, by then, about 2 percent of Israel’s population was made up of communities of Russian origin, settled mainly in the colonies of the occupied West Bank.
At the same time, attempts by the US administration to build a direct relationship between Israelis and Palestinians were ongoing. 1993 saw the first secret contacts between Israeli and PLO representatives, building the basis for what would become the Oslo Accords. The PLO leadership was convinced to enter into this process because it was well-aware of its own isolation and, at the same time, conscious of how unequal a bilateral head-to-head would be.
Arafat and Rabin
The change in Russia’s policy, the division among the Arab countries (with the open hostility of some of them), and the non-invitation to Madrid, convinced the Palestinians to take their cause into their own hands. The meetings between Arafat and Israeli premier Rabin were preceded by an exchange of letters in which Arafat made certain commitments — first and foremost, the recognition of Israel’s existence and the abandonment of the use of terrorism. In the Arab camp, the ground had been prepared by the 1988 decision with which, for the first time, the PLO accepted the two-state solution on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 242. As Paola Caridi observes in her book Hamas, it was no coincidence that this Islamist movement now sought to accredit itself as an ‘alternative’ force to the PLO by publishing its founding charter, the Mithaq, which did not recognise the existence of Israel. All this is also to understand how, in the different phases of the negotiations, both Arafat and Rabin were pressed, in their respective camps, by forces working for their delegitimisation.
The Oslo Accords (20 August 1993), also called the Declaration of Principles, defined a transitional arrangement of the West Bank into three areas with different sovereignty, of which only one, the area around Ramallah, was placed under direct Palestinian control. The fundamental issues for coexistence between the two states — the status of Jerusalem, the right of return of 1948 Palestinian refugees, illegal settlements, security, and borders — were meant to be addressed five years later.
At the same time (1 November 1993), the Treaty on European Union (TEU) came into force. It was based on three pillars: the first was of an economic nature (EC), whose decisions were made by majority vote and using the ‘Community method’; the second and third pillars, respectively: Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and judicial and police cooperation within the Union, were intergovernmental policies that required unanimous voting by governments. In this regard, it is worth remembering that CFSP did not replace the foreign policies of individual states, but only complemented them.
Once again, one of the first tests of this policy was the peace process between Israel and Palestine. On 1 October 1993, the main conference of forty donor countries in support of the Middle East peace process was held in Washington. This time, the EU participated fully and, in time, became the first donor in support of the Palestinian Authority; funding that was all the more necessary because, due to the Gulf War, some Arab countries had suspended economic support to the PLO, diverting it to Islamist formations, like Hamas, which was born in Palestine during the first Intifada in 1987.
Europe and the United States
The former, protagonists of the geopolitical strategy, the latter, a sort of paying official in charge of bearing the financial burden of the Peace Process. This became even clearer when the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership was launched with the Barcelona Declaration in 1995. Of the three ‘pillars’ of the Declaration, the most disappointing — and consequently fragile — pillar of the implementation of the Partnership was the one entitled: ‘Political and Security Partnership: Establishing a Common Area of Peace and Stability’. It was a series of statements of principle and high-minded intentions without any implementation mechanism. So much so that it was the part of the Partnership that was completely unimplemented. Most seriously, it was stated in the preamble that the Partnership was not intended to replace other peace and security initiatives in the region. This was an explicit declaration of deference toward the United States. This historical subalternity can also be explained by the geopolitical phase in which the Barcelona Conference took place.
With the Taba Accords (September 1995), also called Oslo 2, certain aspects of Oslo were honed further. Other population centres were included in the Palestinian-administered Area A, there was the first recognition of the Palestinian Authority of interim self-government (pending elections), and the Palestinian police was established, with tasks of internal security, the Israeli army was left with the power to intervene in the entire area. The Agreements were signed by Arafat and Rabin; for the first time, the EU appeared as guarantor together with the United States, Russia, Egypt, Jordan and Norway. In 1996, the first general elections were held and Fatah won 50 of the 88 seats (51 in the West Bank, 37 in Gaza); the remaining 35 were assigned to independent candidates and smaller formations.
The assassination of Rabin (4 November 1995), the extension of the settlements, the division of the internal areas that subjected the Palestinians to continuous and humiliating controls, and the militarisation of the West Bank, all contributed to complicating the life of the Palestinian people, both in the West Bank and Gaza, and in East Jerusalem where the expulsion of the inhabitants continued. The post-Oslo period proved, right from the start, to be a huge disappointment. In this climate, the EU countries, aware of the worsening of the crisis, took a committed position in Berlin in 1999 in which, for the first time, they declared that ‘the creation of a sovereign, peaceful viable and democratic Palestinian state is the best guarantee for Israel’s security.’
The Camp David Summit
At that point, the situation seemed to have a sudden acceleration, as Israeli premier Ehud Barak convinced president Bill Clinton that he could end his presidential term with a historic result: peace in the Middle East. This is how the Camp David summit that took place between 11 and 24 July 2000 was conceived. The improvisation with which the summit was prepared, the fact that Barak had languished for months in negotiations with Syria — so much so that in the meantime he had lost the political majority that supported his government — and, finally, the fact that he appeared more interested in the external echoes of proposals that were never really put forward to the Palestinians, all laid the foundations for the summit’s failure.
Today we can say that Arafat was not responsible for that failure, as is sometimes still repeated. For proof we need only mention the fact that Barak changed his story several times about the points on which Arafat allegedly showed his ‘intransigence’. In reality, it became clear that the real purpose was to show how Israel had no reliable interlocutors with whom to deal in the face of what Barak called ‘Israel’s generous offer’.
This version was taken up and amplified in a media offensive that I — a Member of the European Parliament in those years — saw at close hand, having to enter into sharp discussions even with authoritative representatives of the Italian and European Left. Among other things, there is no written documentation of the Camp David summit of July 2000. Only the accurate and meticulous work of Charles Enderlin, France 2’s correspondent in Jerusalem, based on notes and the comparison of different accounts, has allowed us to gain some partial understanding of the summit, long after the events.
To understand the catastrophic outcome of the summit, one must bear in mind what had happened on the ground, and in particular on the West Bank, since Oslo. The situation, in fact, had become explosive; the quadruplication of the settlements, accelerated during Barak’s government, gives the impression that this was not just a tactic to increase Israel’s negotiating power, but rather a real colonial strategy that, in fact, would go as far as today’s acceleration, openly boasted about by the Netanyahu government.
Thus Enderlin in the introduction to his book Le rêve brisé comments ‘I was, in fact, convinced that the negotiations, as they were conducted after Rabin’s assassination, would lead to failure. Was the gap not deepening, perhaps, day by day between the reality on the ground and the discourse of the negotiators? In the refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank, I was told that life had become more difficult after 1996. The Palestinians asked me: if they wanted to make peace, why were they accelerating the construction of settlements on our land? And why do we have to go through so many military checkpoints?’
Yet, at that summit, some taboos had been broken and work could have been done on the most controversial points such as the right of return, and Jerusalem. More complicated was the question of borders because the Palestinians had never been offered an (even hypothetical) state with territorial continuity, but four separate territorial areas, with the consequent impossibility of an autonomous air space, or of freedom of movement for citizens, both inside and outside Palestine. In short: they would have to submit eternally to Israel’s military control.
From the ‘common strategy’ to the ‘descent into hell’
Three weeks before the Camp David Summit, the European Council meeting in Santa Maria da Feira, under the Portuguese EU presidency, had adopted a ‘Common Strategy on the Mediterranean Region’. This revived the idea of the EU playing an active role to ensure a just and lasting solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. This declaration fell amidst a deeply compromised situation, despite the fact that in 1999, with the Treaty of Amsterdam, the figure of the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy had been established, and since 1996 the Spanish diplomat Miguél Angel Moratinos had been working as EU Representative for the Middle East Peace Process, succeeded in 2003 by the Belgian ambassador Marc Otte.
This was, in fact, already the phase defined by many observers as ‘the beginning of the descent into hell’. The Second Intifada exploded on 28 September 2000, after the failure of the Camp David summit, and as a reaction to opposition leader Ariel Sharon’s provocative entry onto the al-Aqsa Mosque compound; it would last until 2005, a year after Arafat’s death. This was a climate in which the protagonism of Hamas emerged more and more, gradually overshadowing the Palestinian Authority, bridled in its role in government and less in touch with the lives and real needs of the population.
The Twin Towers attacks in 2001 aggravated this already dramatic picture. In his speech on 24 June 2002, George W. Bush announced the termination of all relations with Yasser Arafat and the PLO, thus providing carte blanche to the Israeli government. Sharon’s election as prime minister led to the Israeli army’s despicable move to systematically destroy all the infrastructure that the Palestinian National Authority had built since 1994 — most of which was built with European funds — and to besiege the Mukataa, Arafat’s headquarters, in order to paralyse its activities.
In 2003, president Bush agreed to resume negotiations between the parties through the ‘Road Map’ and the Quartet, the latter consisting of US, Russian, EU and UN representatives. The road-map envisaged several stages, the first of which would have involved freezing ongoing Israeli colonisation and future settlement projects. The conclusion of the process was to take place in 2005. Once again, the reality on the ground went in a completely different direction.
The Sharon government’s policy, in fact, complicated Palestinians' life and economy even more with the decision to build the ‘wall of shame’. This was done in order to protect the colonial settlements, but some 88% of it was built on Palestinian land across a length of 712 km, further splicing up the West Bank. Freedom of movement for the Palestinian population was completely undermined and placed under the control of the Israeli army, with the humiliation of countless both fixed and mobile checkpoints, and the impossibility of using infrastructure built specifically for settlers. In Gaza, things were no better despite the withdrawal of the Israeli settlements in 2005. 8,000 settlers had to leave — an acceptable price to pay, compared to the goal of the total isolation of the strip.
Gaza as ‘occupied territory’ and Hamas’s victory
Legally, Gaza would remain ‘occupied territory’, with Israel in control its movement of people and essential supplies. The militarisation of daily life and the permitted movements to the richer Israel for menial and precarious jobs were bound to have social and political consequences in both societies. Israeli society was, moreover, much affected by the arrival of returning settlers, driven by a spirit of conquest and revenge in a small and already densely populated land.
The European Union, unable to play any strong political role, confirmed its approach mainly concentrating on economic issues and on supporting certain developments such as the elections held in Palestine in 2005 and 2006. The context in which the vote took place was completely different from the path imagined by the road-map and the leading forces in the 1996 elections. This time, Hamas entered the field with an ambiguous but less drastic position on the idea of negotiations, also in order to rival Fatah on more properly ‘institutional’ ground.
In the 2005 presidential elections, Hamas did not present candidates and Abu Mazen was elected with 60% of the vote. The general elections of the following year brought a triumph for Hamas’s candidates, not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The votes for Hamas were slightly higher in percentage terms, but the majoritarian voting system gave it a clear majority of seats. Having participated in both elections as a ‘European observer’, I can testify to the fairness of the vote and to my disquiet at having to note the majority support for a fundamentalist party.
The handling of this vote was somewhat problematic, for the Palestinians but also for the EU. The European Council, in fact, had included Hamas’s armed wing on the list of terrorist formations in 2001, only to include the entire organisation on the list in 2003. The internal clash among the Palestinians led Hamas — in a bloody act — to impose its rule in Gaza after a failed attempt to set up a government of national unity. Meanwhile, Abu Mazen’s Palestinian Authority retained — albeit in a further-weakened position — the government over the part of the West Bank recognised by the Oslo Accords.
European funding continued to support the Palestinian Authority, UNRWA (the UN agency for Palestinian refugees) and some NGOs working in Gaza with the civilian population. Hamas received resources in alternating phases from Iran and Qatar, with the tolerance of the Netanyahu government, which had an interest in dividing the Palestinian front to the advantage of the more radical and religious side.
In this regard, in an article in the Wall Street Journal on 29 October 2023, the Qatari ambassador to the US, Meshal bin Hamad al Thani, recalled that it was Washington that asked Qatar to host Hamas leaders in order to establish ‘indirect lines of communication’; consequently, in 2012, Hamas opened its political office in Doha. As for funding, he states that the funding for Gaza was carried out in full coordination with Israel, the US and UN agencies. All this explains Qatar’s role in the delicate negotiations over releasing hostages.
Europe’s economic role
On the economic level, the EU has, over time, played a hardly negligible role. It can, indeed, be argued that Europe has been the most significant player in this regard, with clear differences in its respective relations to the Palestinian Authority and Israel. In fact, while for the Palestinians the EU has played a mainly welfare and infrastructure-development role, for Israel, which has an advanced economy, relations have been about economic agreements and trade. Both Israel and the Palestinian Authority have been part of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership and now of the Neighbourhood Policy. The EU also had direct responsibilities in two specific missions: the training of the Palestinian police, as well as a mission in Rafah, in order to reassure both Egypt and Israel on the management of the Rafah crossing.
Since 2007, violence has totally replaced politics, with over than fifteen years of increasingly bloody actions and reactions, in an acceleration of the low-intensity conflict that has produced an unacceptable number of deaths, especially among the Palestinian population in Gaza but also in the West Bank, where the Israeli army has been employed to protect illegal colonisation. In 2007–8, Ehud Olmert’s government, with the involvement of president Bush, attempted in Annapolis, Maryland the same move as Barak did with Clinton, proposing yet another peace conference; but the US, given the precedents, was much more cautious.
The Olmert government put forward a proposal of territorial compensation to president Abu Mazen; however, while the part of the territory due to Israel would be acquired immediately, the part due to the Palestinians would be ceded only after Hamas had abandoned Gaza. This practically meant civil war, also because Abu Mazen — elected in the 2005 presidential vote — was politically weakened, if not delegitimised outright by the result of the legislative elections. In fact, Olmert himself was very weak, faced with corruption allegations, and would not stand for a second term.
On 7 October 2023, Israel found itself vulnerable; all the technological measures and militarised isolation of the Palestinians were not enough to prevent the massacre. This is the quantum leap that this event brought about and which Hamas openly lays claim to; it makes it comparable to the
American 9/11. However, Israel’s reaction follows an already tried-and-tested pattern — remember Operation Cast Lead (27 December 2008 — 18 January 2009) in which, after the bombings, the Israeli army entered Gaza for the first time — taking it to a level never reached before, namely indiscriminate bombings and massive entry into Gaza with the aim of destroying Hamas. This has never produced greater security for Israel, not least because the cost that civilians have been made to pay has only increased feelings of hatred and revenge and, consequently, strengthened the legitimacy of Hamas as the only force capable of reacting to Israeli oppression.
Beyond the divided continent?
Im all this, the European Union has appeared divided, cowardly, and irrelevant, more focused on achieving a ‘lowest common denominator’ internally than on playing any useful role in this conflict. All this is aggravated by the fact that, in foreign policy, the overlapping of roles such as that of the president of the Commission, the president of the European Parliament, the High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, the President of the European Council, and the rotating president of the European Union — not to mention the autonomous role of the 27 member states — all led to yet another short-circuit. This has had dismal consequences.
This was clearly demonstrated by the outcome of the European Council of 26-27 October 2023 where governments failed to agree on a ceasefire demand. In the same hours, the EU member states openly split into three different positions at the UN General Assembly. Moreover, an unprecedented event also occurred, namely that more than 800 officials of the European Commission signed an open letter criticising President von der Leyen, who, in the immediate aftermath of the events, had supported the military reaction of the Netanyahu government without mentioning the limits set by international and humanitarian law. Moreover, she evidently did this without
consulting anyone.
All this leads to a serious and urgent reflection on the role of the EU in the new world context, not least because wars are now at our doorstep and the policy of ‘desistance’ practised so far with regard to the US may no longer be sufficient after the events on Capitol Hill and the outcome of the forthcoming US elections. The necessary changes, however, would need a political will capable of overcoming the current cacophony, peculiar to an international confederation, and moving toward a federalist-type project involving even just some of today’s EU member states.
With regard to the Middle East, it should not be forgotten that there is still an EU Special Envoy for Peace in the person of an excellent Dutch diplomat, Sven Koopmans, with a respectable career behind him, precisely in the difficult field of conflict resolution. His role remains overlooked, paralysed by the divisions among European governments. Yet the EU could make an important contribution to resolving this conflict on a new basis, as the two-state solution has been ground down and — together with it — trust and the very possibility
of coexistence.
Reproposing that formula today as if it were within reach is illusory as well as false. What the EU can do is to give both peoples the prospect that their pacification, whatever institutional form it will take, can be welcomed in the European home. All this is also to answer for our historical faults, which, if they apply to Israel as a land of hope after the Holocaust, also apply to Palestine, which in 1948 was not a desert, but a populated place where we Europeans unloaded our responsibilities, both from the colonial past and from World War II.
Any constructive path requires a willingness for coexistence and equal dignity between the two peoples: to this end, Israel should begin by repealing that provocative law approved by a slim majority (62 in favour 55 against, 2 abstentions) by the Knesset on 19 July 2018. This is a text that decrees Israel to be the nation state of the Jewish people — making an ethno-religious standard the very basis of citizenship.