Kathy Gannon – ‘Civilized’ Europe: EU Feeds Hungry Palestinians while Allowing Israel to Starve Them

It is not civilized. It is barbaric .

Kathy Gannon is the former AP News Director for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Four decades reporting the fault lines of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and the wider region.

Cross-posted from the Whitbeck Blog

Photo by ALEXANDRE LALLEMAND on Unsplash

A statement by Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission and the EU’s most powerful figure, reminded me of a CBS reporter who once described Europe, unlike Iraq and Afghanistan, as “relatively civilised.”

Von der Leyen’s statement came at the end of a July meeting of the commission in Ireland.

Reporters questioned von der Leyen about the EU’s refusal to reach a consensus on punishing Israel for committing genocide in Gaza. She seemed indignant. The reporters didn’t use the word genocide, but genocide it is, according to international scholars on genocide.

She said she wanted to set the record straight, before proceeding to tell reporters that “We (the EU) are the world’s largest provider of assistance to the Palestinian people, the largest. No one does more than us.”

“We have organised 85 humanitarian aid bridge flights, and delivered more than 5,600 tonnes of essential supplies. So, this, I think, is important to know – no one does more than us,” said von der Leyen.

Von der Leyen appeared blind to the irony and deeply troubling implications of her remarks and her thinking as she proudly told reporters that the EU is feeding millions of starving Palestinians in Gaza—people being deliberately starved by Israel, a country the EU refuses to punish for what international law defines as a war crime.

The EU delivered 5,000 tonnes of essential supplies, she went on to say. Supplies made essential because Israel has dropped the equivalent of upward of 10 Hiroshima-sized bombs on the tiny Gaza strip, intentionally destroying critical infrastructure, like power plants, water supply systems, almost all the hospitals in Gaza, leaving Palestinians to suffer horribly, including several documented instances of children enduring amputations without anesthetic.

Her words—and her apparent outrage at any suggestion that the EU was failing suffering Palestinians—were deeply disturbing, even a little frightening, especially as the EU continues to sign defense and trade agreements with Israel, provide arms used to kill Palestinians, and still refuses to sanction or hold Israel accountable.

Germany alone has doubled its weapons supplies to Israel this year alone, sending $934 million worth of weapons to Israel to support its genocide. Nicaragua has filed a case in the International Court of Justice alleging Germany did not prevent the crime of genocide . knowingly supplying weapons to Israel despite criminal allegations of genocide.

The EU president ignores the damning contradiction: praising aid that helps Palestinians survive the genocide while simultaneously backing, enabling, and even arming Israel—now openly pursuing the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

This week, Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Givr outlined a plan of forcibly expelling Palestinians from Gaza and sending them abroad .

Ben Givr who was speaking in the run- up to Israeli elections said his plan would forcibly remove 250,000 Palestinians from Gaza in the first year and the remainder over six years, according to a Guardian newspaper report.

And yet the EU can’t even agree to sanction Ben Givr, who this week posted on social media an AI generated image of him overseeing a long line of Palestinians being led into what looked like a gas camber. He later removed the image after a public outcry.

Listening to von der Leyen, I wondered how anyone could describe Europe as “relatively civilised,” recalling the words once used by CBS senior national security correspondent Charles D’Agata.

It was 2022, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

D’Agata was reporting from Kyiv. He was searching for words to express his own feelings of surprise and the disquiet he was feeling at seeing Ukraine under siege.

Ukraine, D’Agota explained “isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan, that has seen conflict raging for decades. . .This is a relatively civilized, relatively European — I have to choose those words carefully, too — city, where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.”

He since apologised saying it was a “bad choice of words.” But it was much more than a bad choice of words.

It denied the truth. Iraq is the seat of civilization, invaded by the United States and Britain; and Afghanistan, has been at wars orchestrated by invaders, first by the former Soviet Union, which stretches over both Asia and the “relatively civilised” European continent and then in 2001 by the United States.

Not only was it much more than a “bad choice of words” it also misrepresented history. “Relatively civilized” Europe has seen conflicts rage over decades. “Relatively civilised” Europe has also committed the most horrific crimes of the 20th century and today is a participant in one of the most horrific crimes of the 21st century, this one by Israel.

Europe’s history speaks for itself: Both world wars began there; the Holocaust the worst crime in history, which killed more than six million Jews as well as Romani people, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Poles, and Soviet prisoners of war also occurred there; and the continent was later scarred by the Yugoslav Wars of 1991–2001.

As recent as in July1995, “relatively civilised” European Bosnian Serbs killed upward of 8,000 Bosnian men and boys from the town of Srebrenica. “It was the largest massacre in Europe since the Holocaust,” according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museaum.

“Relatively civilised” Europe is a myth that hides a much uglier reality, shared by much of the world, exposed by its inexplicable acceptance of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.

This refusal to punish Israel, to hold Israel accountable for the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, the horror suffered by Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, inflicted at will by radical violent Jewish settlers, aided and abetted by the Israeli army, is certainly not Europe’s crime alone, but is shared by so many leaders in most countries.

It is not “civilized. It is barbaric.