Europe Must Get Off the Sidelines in the Middle East: The EU Needs a More Assertive Plan for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

8 comments

1. [SS from essay by Josep Borrell Fontelles, former Vice President and High Representative of the European Union Commission and the former Foreign Minister of Spain; and Kalypso Nicolaidis, Professorial Chair in International Affairs at the Florence School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute. Formerly at Harvard, Oxford, and the École National d’Aministration, she has advised EU bodies and is a coauthor of [*A Citizen’s Guide to the Rule of Law*](https://www.amazon.com/Citizens-Guide-Rule-Law-Invention/dp/3838215419).]

   The European Union has rarely played more than an auxiliary role in helping resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in spite of its multifaceted presence in the region. Over the past two decades, European governments came to believe that achieving a two-state solution was more or less impossible and not worth the investment of time and energy. And to many Europeans, supporting the status quo in Israel while rhetorically condemning some of the country’s actions seemed manageable.

   It was not. As Europe and the rest of the world looked away, the costs of failing to secure a durable peace in which both Israelis and Palestinians enjoy the right to self-determination became exorbitant.

2. Why? What does the EU get from being more directly involved? They spent decades pourings hundreds of billions of dollars into countless NGO’s and UN agencies that achieved absolutely **NOTHING** and in some cases made things worse.

   This silly article is filled with the same old empty platitudes about “supporting the UN” and trying to guilt Europeans into pouring even more resources into a cause that has little effect on them. My favorite part was saying that **Europeans should pay to rebuild Gaza**.

   This is also a gem:

   >The EU could support the convening of a citizens’ “peace assembly” made up of randomly selected Israelis and Palestinians who would gather on neutral ground over several months to help design a path to peace. 

   To think the guy that wrote this used to be the top foreign policy official of the EU, sigh.

3. Europe cannot even agree on their own collective defense. They have very little power projection. They need Israeli weapons and technology if they want to modernize their military.

   What do they gain besides feeling important…?
   Nvm, I see why they want to get involved.

4. They should first focus on their continent

5. My god that was one of the most ignorant articles that I have ever read in FP magazine, completely takes agency away from the players in the Middle East and completely misunderstands the reality in Israel vs it neighbors.

6. I live in the EU and I can guarantee you we won’t even solve any of our problems.

7. This is just a gold mine of bad takes.

   The entire argument is “Treat Israel and the PA evenly, put some sanctions on Israel to be fair, adhere to international law, and you’ll get a 2ss”.
   Tiny things like European countries disagreeing on their basic alignment in the conflict being waved as “we’ll work on it” or “we’ll just bypass the countries who disagree”.

   It’s supposed to be in Europe’s interest, not because of any material benefit but because “international law is important to Europe”. Pretty much any core obstacle to sloving the conflict is ignored in favor of repeating “international law” every 5 sentences.
   How can a forgien court solve the literal capital city being a disputed territory? The Israelis seeing any Palestinian state as an existential military threat? Hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers in the west bank? Palestinians seeing Israel’s entire territory as rightfully theirs? Any proposed map making a Palestinian state split in 2 parts separated by Israel? There being 2 Palestinian governments with the PA not actually ruling Gaza?
   International law!

   Not to mention the obnoxious claim of “historical European duty to intervene”, even claiming it’s more important than Europe’s own security (an absurd statement, especially in a forgien policy magazine)

   > Europeans bear significant responsibility for the conflicts currently roiling the Middle East.

   **They just don’t. Independent countries and their leaders consistently making bad decisions over decades are responsible for the state of the Middle East. The excuse of colonization almost a century ago and the region not being completely isolated from the rest of the world afterwards is just that – an excuse**.
   Egypt didn’t kick out UN peace keepers before the 1967 war because of the Balfour declaration and Israelis aren’t apathetic to the suffering they cause in Gaza currently because of the Holocaust.
   Playing 6 degrees of separation to tie every modern occurrence to historical roots is a pointless exercise.

   > Europeans did not push back against the UN’s failure to implement its partition plan, which would have established a homeland in Palestine for two peoples.

   … which would be at war pretty much immediately. Look at a map of that plan – it was doomed from inception. It was just as callous if not worse than the other lines this article (rightfully) deride Europeans for drawing.

   > But Europeans cannot simply revert to a moralistic tendency to tell others what to do. They must assert that it is in their own interest, too…

   “We can’t just tell people what to do, we also need to explain to them their own interests”.

   > It is undermining the foundations of the international order that Europeans cherish and rely on.

   It doesn’t. Those were always weak and unreliable foundations. Russia didn’t conquer Crimea in 2014 because of west bank settlements and North Korea isn’t a totalitarian nightmare because of Palestinian suicide bombings.

   (it follows this by suggesting some sanctions which are so weak and irrelevant they probably won’t even backfire, then suggesting Europe will be a better mediator than the U.S. because “Europeans learnned most people want to live in peace”, then suggesting to solve online echo chambers real quick, then saying you can’t treat democratic states and terrorists orgs diffrently because “justice is blind and doing so would make it political” – **I’m not unpacking this nonsense**)

8. No, Europe needs to get its shit together

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