By Geraldina Colotti on December 10, 2023
Ursula von der Leyen meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu
The genocide of the Palestinian people was recalled several times in the analyses of the Anti-imperialist Congress that closed in Caracas and that had as its theme the contrast between Bolivarianism and Monroism throughout history, that is, in confrontation between the struggle of the peoples for independence and imperialism, in colonial and neocolonial form. The Network of intellectuals, artists and social movements in defense of humanity (Redh) has approved a document strongly condemning the Zionist occupation and has called for “a boycott of the military, war training and intelligence services that Israel markets in the world. We also call for the cessation of war supplies to that country. We call – he said – to deepen the generalized boycott of the products exported by that country to the whole world”.
The flagrant genocide taking place in Gaza shows once again the hypocrisy of international organizations. Last October, during the visit to Tel Aviv of the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, accompanied by the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, they shook hands with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, expressing their unconditional support for him in his massacre against the Palestinians, motivated by the “right to defense”. And they declared, “When a friend is attacked, we must stand united.” In reality, rather than united, the European democracies – those of the bankers and the big international institutions – are a group of sharks ready to tear each other apart for their own interests, as was seen during the Covid-19 pandemic.
However, they all seem to converge on one point, albeit differently placed in the chain of subordination to NATO and therefore to the United States: the importance to be attributed to the war economy and the military industrial complex in dealing with the structural crisis in which the capitalist system finds itself, evident in several countries, starting with Germany. Here lies the almost unconditional support of the EU governments to the Zionist entity, despite the fact that since October 7 the Israeli army has dropped 20,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip, equivalent to approximately 1.5 times the explosive force of the bomb unleashed on Hiroshima, killing more than 18,000 Palestinians, among them more than 7,000 children. One death every 4 minutes. But the intertwining of consolidated interests and the need to control the Middle East area through the main US policeman in the region, are worth more than the extermination of Palestinian children: a genocide planned for years by the Zionist entity, as shown by several studies of humanitarian organizations, generally eager to hide the fierce asymmetry inherent to the Israeli occupation and to condemn, first of all, Palestinian “terrorism”. A plan demonstrated, once again, by the significant budget earmarked for the further development of the settlements and, therefore, for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by the government of the executioner Netanhyau: 121 million out of a billion euro package, 23 of which are earmarked for “search and destroy” EU projects in favor of the Palestinian communities in Area C of the West Bank, 60% of which are controlled militarily and administratively by the occupier.
It must be said that, while the occupier, with the complicity of the EU, prohibits the return of Palestinians to the territories stolen from them, every Jew in the world has the right to settle in “Israel”. In 2015, most of the more than 7,900 immigrants who traveled to “Israel” came from France. Now the considerable sum of 81 million euros will be spent on supplying the settlers with weapons. These include assault rifles, vehicles, surveillance technologies and drones. Although the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, protested (on the X-account) that “settlements are a serious violation of international humanitarian law”, and even the European Central Bank invited Netanyahu to divert funds from the colonies to an economy “frozen” since October 7, many of those weapons and those systems of controls from which they come Europe. The countries of the European Union, as a whole, constitute the world’s second largest supplier of military systems to the Zionist regime: from 2001 to 2020, the countries of the Union authorized exports of military systems to Tel Aviv for more than 7.7 billion euros, with more than 636 million in 2020. It is worth remembering that “Israel” is one of the world’s leading military powers: with a military expenditure of more than 23 billion dollars a year (approximately 5 percent of its gross domestic product).
If until the 1980s several European leaders strongly defended the right to Palestinian self-determination and defined Israeli settlements as illegal after the Six-Day War, in the following decade, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Washington’s dominance, support for the Zionist entity – from the economic to the political and cultural level – has become predominant. The EU is also the largest donor of funds to the Palestinian Authority and in 2022 the European Commission approved a new aid package worth €224.8 million, adding to the approximately €300 million allocated annually since 2013. Since the Council of the Union has included Hamas in its entirety on the list of “terrorist organizations”, no EU funds or support activities go to the Gaza-ruling organization, having been voted by the majority of Palestinians.
However, after October 7, some EU countries, such as Germany and Austria, suspended all payments made by their governments, inviting the European Union to do the same and to openly side with “Israel”, considered a “European country” despite not being part of the EU. Moreover, the European Union is the main commercial partner of the Zionist entity, which grows at the expense of the colonial exploitation of the Palestinian territories. In 2022, 28.8% of EU trade came from “Israel”, which received 31.9% of EU imports and sent 25.6% of exports to EU markets. After the Oslo Accords, the Zionist entity became the closest Euro-Mediterranean partner of the European Union in the southern Mediterranean, second only to Turkey, and the only country to have reached industrial standards equal to or higher than those of the bloc’s Member States, allowing mutual cooperation, which is also important from the energy point of view. In fact, in recent times, thanks to its role as occupier in the area, the Zionist entity has discovered large offshore deposits of natural gas, which have allowed it to become an exporter and reduce its energy dependence. Meanwhile, by imposing a naval blockade on the Gaza Strip since 2007, it has prevented the Palestinians from exploiting a gas field off the Gaza coast and exporting their products.
And European universities are closely linked to Zionist research institutes, directly involved in military colonization programs, such as, in Italy, the Technion (Israeli Institute of Technology) which determines their orientations, finalizing research for war or social control purposes.
Source: Network in Defense of Humanity, translation Resumen Latinoamericano-English