Europe in the Arab League

From Commentary Magazine, 17 June 2014, by Tom Wilson:

EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton (photo credit: Miriam Alster/Flash90)

After five days of silence, the European Union has finally released a stock-statement condemning the kidnapping of three Israeli students. But even this only comes after Prime Minister Netanyahu poured scorn on European countries for their harsh criticism of Israel as compared to their total failure to condemn such terrorist acts. 

The full extent of the EU’s Israel problem was demonstrated last week at a conference in Athens where European foreign ministers and their Arab League counterparts signed a ten page declaration that outrageously praised the Palestinians for their supposed commitment to peace and democracy while castigating Israel for its “unilateral’” actions.

...looking over the moral inversions in this document each could have just as plausibly been authored by the Arab states as the European ones. And when there’s no perceivable distinction between the foreign policy of Europe and that of the Arab world then...you know there’s cause for concern.

In places the assertions of the ten-page declaration are laughable. There is praise for the Palestinian commitment to democracy; this despite the fact that the Palestinian Authority has been postponing an election that became overdue in 2009, while in Gaza Hamas, who seized power in a military coup, murdered the political opposition, and censored the press, has never countenanced an election since. Similarly, the declaration welcomes the new Fatah-Hamas unity government, calling on Israel to work with it and claiming that this represents a promising step toward a two-state solution. How anyone that claims to favor two states can welcome a Hamas backed government—Hamas being the terrorist movement committed to extinguishing the Jewish state—is simply unfathomable. And no less contradictory is the declaration’s condemnation of Israel’s “unilateral” acts in Jerusalem alongside its support for Palestinian unilateral acts to pursue membership of committees at the United Nations. For one thing it is absurd that when Arabs build homes in Jerusalem it’s just Arabs building homes in Jerusalem, but when Jews have the audacity to build homes in their own religious, historical and political capital, well then it’s a strategic unilateral act warranting a mini-diplomatic crisis. But more importantly the Palestinian moves at the United Nations are in direct breach of the Oslo peace accords, and many of the signatories of this declaration were supposed to serve as guarantors to Oslo.

Most appalling of all is the declaration’s utter failing to condemn Hamas rocket fire against Israeli civilians. Yes, there’s one of those completely redundant lines about opposing “all acts of violence” by both sides. But nowhere is there any specific mention of the civilian-bound rockets dispatched from Hamas controlled Gaza on a daily basis. Yet the declaration complains at length about the “grave humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip largely caused by the closure imposed by the Occupying Power.” The ministers also stressed their position that “Israeli settlements, the separation barrier built anywhere in the occupied Palestinian territory, home demolitions and evictions are illegal under international law and constitute obstacles for peace and they endanger the viability of the two-state solution.”

The Arab world’s attitude toward the Jewish state has long been considered alongside the fact that the ancient Jewish communities in these countries were decimated and forced to flee in the same decade that the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe were made to vanish.

But given the worsening condition of Jewish life in Western Europe, for how long can the EU’s attitude toward the Jewish state and the fate of its own Jews not be considered in light of one another? Over the weekend Paris witnessed a spate of anti-Semitic incidents, and in all of these places Jews are considering their future; whether to stay or go.

By the best assessment Europe is failing in its primary obligation to protect a part of its citizenry. But in light of these failings to protect the basic human rights of their own Jews, it is extraordinary that Europeans think they’re in a position to join with the Arab League, with its abominable human rights record, in lecturing the Jewish state.