Europe’s Alliance with Israel
Book Review: Europe’s Alliance with Israel - by David Cronin - PlutoPress, London and New York, 2011 ISBN: 9780745330655 - £16 in the UK
By its own account, the European Union “sees human rights as universal and indivisible. It actively promotes and defends them both within its borders and when engaging in relations with non-EU countries.” i
Brussels-based Irish journalist David Cronin demonstrates in Europe’s Alliance with Israel that this is not the case with regard to Israel/Palestine where, as the title and subtitle (Aiding the Occupation) make explicit, the EU proudly allies itself with Israel and its violations of Palestinian human rights.
Cronin traces the history of European involvement in creating and maintaining the Zionist state from British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour’s infamous 1917 declaration that Palestine “should be the location of the ‘Jewish national home’” without any consultation with its natives (in 1920 he wrote that “Zionism, be it right or wrong, …is… of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700 000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land”), through Czechoslovakia’s sales of arms to Israel during the latter’s “war of independence” (the Palestinian nakbah) in 1948 and France’s assistance in creating Israel’s clandestine nuclear programme in the early 1950s, to the EU’s present de facto backing for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people and its eagerness to offer the Zionist state trading privileges that make it, to all intents and purposes, an EU member in all but name.
“In colonial times,” he writes perceptively, “the European powers asserted their might through a variety of divide and rule strategies. The present-day ruling elites in Europe and the United States are helping Israel to hone such a strategy in Palestine.” Robert Cooper, a British diplomat and admirer of Israel who for a time was an adviser to Tony Blair, is cited as claiming that “[c]ommitment to a country means having to live with whatever policies the government of the day there is pursuing…” This recipe, religiously followed by the EU, concedes total impunity to Israel in the name of a “commitment” entirely beyond good and evil.
The placing of Hamas on the proscribed terrorist list in 2003 and the refusal to accept the result of the 2006 election “freely and fairly” won by Hamas invalidated any supposition that the EU might play a role in the Middle East that somehow counterbalanced the USA’s unconditional support for the Israeli rogue state. Indeed the EU seems content - no doubt for “reasons of state” - to act as a vassal of the USA when it comes to relations with Israel.
Scarcely an EU member state escapes Cronin’s strictures. Germany has provided Israel with nuclear-capable Dolphin submarines, with one-third of their cost borne by Germany itself (presumably to atone for Hitler’s Judeocide by facilitating Israel’s Arabicide). Italy’s maniacal prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, “[u]nburdened by anything resembling a principle, … has been quite happy to nurture ever-closer relations with Israel as part of a foreign policy that is largely dictated to him from Washington.” The Dutch, uniquely among founding members of the EU (or EEC, as it was then), “supported Israel in its 1967 war against Egypt, Syria and Jordan”, and the former Dutch foreign minister (now deputy prime minister) Maxime Verhagen has been an enthusiastic advocate of Israel’s admission to the EU.
The Eastern European member states, all of them “in the pocket of the United States”, are no better. “Czech-Israeli ties cannot be viewed in isolation from the servility towards the United States that has become endemic among Prague-based politicians. ‘It is a case of a friend of our friend has to be our friend too,’” according to a Czech diplomat. “Jerzy Halberstadt, director of a museum being built next to the Warsaw Ghetto memorial” says that “Poles are more strongly pro-American and a side effect of this is that Poland also has the strongest pro-Israel policy…” Romania, grossly impoverished, has relied upon the giant Israeli arms firm Elbit to upgrade its military capabilities to NATO level.
As for Ireland, Palestine’s self-styled “best friend” in the EU, Cronin rightly calls to mind past occasions when this epithet seemed justified, such as Brian Lenihan Sr’s recognition of the PLO in 1980, and the honourable service of Irish troops as UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. “Alleging that these soldiers were constantly drunk, the Israelis nicknamed them the ‘Johnnie Walker Irish’ after a whiskey of that name (ironically distilled in Scotland)”, thus incidentally typifying the combination of defamation with factual inaccuracy characteristic of Israeli and Zionist propaganda.
Alas, “Ireland’s defence of the Palestinian underdog became increasingly superficial” with the advance of the Celtic Tiger, which “was built on a willingness to entice the most unscrupulous of foreign investors to the Republic of Ireland through tax sweeteners.” Corporations manufacturing spare parts for US and Israeli weaponry located themselves in Cork, Leixlip and elsewhere, while the Irish army bought drones and helmets from Israel. Political support has been forthcoming too, as Ireland has invariably voted along with its EU “partners” whenever the deepening of relations with Israel has been at issue, despite frequent rhetorical flourishes of unease from the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the day.
In the course of the book Cronin dredges up a litany of hair-raising quotations from EU VIPs, who seem to vie with one another in pusillanimity, mendacity, and servility towards Israel (and the USA): Sarkozy, Merkel, Solana, Frattini, Fini, Verhagen, Straw, Blair, Havel, Topolanek - their words of praise for and obeisance towards Israel tumble out without shame or restraint, while they rarely waste a word on Israel’s murderous oppression of the Palestinians.
In documenting what he repeatedly calls this “unholy alliance”, Cronin makes no secret of his contempt for EU politics, politicians and diplomats. His chapter sub-headings alone drip with derision: After the bombs, a banquet; Rewarding a Rogue; Sarkozy swallows, Merkel marvels; NATO: the pitbull gnashes its teeth; Oiling the war machine with euros; Furtively feeding the war monster… For some, this relentless rubbing of salt into the wounds that he opens may seem inimical to balance and objectivity. For others, it may seem the only balanced response possible in the face of such blatant geo-political cynicism.
Clearly EU backing for Israel is, to coin a Freudian concept, over-determined - no single rationalisation fully explains it, and once the many rationalisations are collated, the result is a kind of transnational madness that inverts the roles of oppressor and oppressed until an entire people - the Palestinians - is sacrificed on the altars of expediency, mendacity and greed. Europe’s alliance with Israel, in short, is a criminal conspiracy.
As Cronin shows, Israel was slow to conclude that exclusive reliance on US support was unwise and that it was advisable to court the EU, given the status of the latter as Israel’s largest export market and its pretensions to becoming a major player on the world stage. The rise of civil society pro-Palestinian activism within the Union and the growth of the movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) - now spreading dramatically to the USA and beyond, and advocated by Cronin as a useful tool whereby citizens of EU countries may counteract their governments’ complicity with Israel - led to the establishment in Brussels of such Zionist advocacy groups as B’nai B’rith (in the USA, the parent organisation of the Anti-Defamation League), the European Jewish Congress (founded in Paris in 1986), and the Transatlantic Institute (set up by the American Jewish Committee, which also founded the highly McCarthyite UN Watch in Geneva).
Meanwhile, it would appear that Irish defenders of Palestinian rights have replaced fugitive Nazis as targets for the venerable Simon Wiesenthal Centre. On November 28th last, the Centre’s director for international relations Shimon Samuels wrote to the Taoiseach (Irish prime minister) Brian Cowen claiming that the cover of David Cronin’s book “arguably fit[s] the 2004 ‘working definition of Anti-Semitism’ of the European Union Fundamental Rights Agency” because by “illustrating an atomised Europe around a Star of David” it “conveyed a subliminal message” “sadly reminiscent of financial scapegoating of the 1930s”, apparently in order “to deflect attention from economic suffering”. The beleaguered Mr Cowen was invited “to publicly condemn the timing” of the book’s Dublin launch, but failed to do so.ii
Apart from its fancifulness and factual inaccuracy (there’s nothing “atomised” about the map of Europe on the book’s cover, and the Star of David appears as part of the Israeli flag), this squib suggests a very real paranoia on the part of the Zionist propaganda machine lest too much light might be shed upon its machinations within the EU. As such, it constitutes a well-earned tribute to Cronin’s rivetting book.
Europe’s Alliance with Israel should be read by anyone who cares about Palestinian rights and European responsibilities.
Raymond Deane is a composer and political activist.
Notes
ihttp://eeas.europa.eu/human_rights/index_en.htm accessed 8th December 2010
iihttp://www.ejpress.org/article/47524 accessed 9th December 2010
Discussion
We welcome and encourage lively discussion from the public about articles on Irish Left Review. You can leave a comment using the form at the bottom of the page. Please read through the existing comments before posting your own.
Leave a Comment
Sins of the Father
Subscribe by Email
Best of the Web
EU Should Admit Greece is Bankrupt | Christian Rickens
The unvarnished truth - the second Greek Bailout should not have happened.
The mistake isn’t the size, but the construction of the bailout package. It isn’t geared to the requirements of the people of Greece but to the needs of the international financial markets, meaning the banks.
How else can one explain the fact that around a quarter of the package won’t even arrive in Athens but will flow directly to the country’s international creditors? The holders of Greek government bonds are to get some €30 billion as an incentive to convert their old paper into new bonds. The aim is to keep alive the illusion that Greece isn’t bankrupt — after all, the creditors are voluntarily forgiving part of the debt. The financial sector is cleverly manipulating the fear that a Greek bankruptcy would trigger a fatal chain reaction.
That leaves €100 billion. But that too isn’t geared to what Greece needs in order to get back on its feet. It’s linked to an estimate of how much debt the Greek economy can bear without collapsing. International technocrats agree that with debts amounting to 120 percent of gross domestic product, the country can just about go on servicing its debt. That’s the level at which the cow can go on supplying milk without dying of exhaustion. So 120 percent became the goal.
Collaboration, with our European partners | Cunning Hired Knaves
The European project was supposed to be a bulwark against the dangers of fascist ambition, but now it is the instrument used to dismantle European democracy in the interest of the risk adverse looking for a steady income stream from the provision of the social net by those who cite the words and actions of old fascists while doing so.
The post Collaboration, with our European partners by Richard of Cunning Hired Knaves summed up in one sentence. For much better sentences and many more urgent points read the post.
On Sunday there were massive demonstrations throughout the Spanish state, with half a million people on the streets of Madrid and 450,000 in Barcelona, protesting against the labour ‘reform’ planned by the Partido Popular, the right-wing party that most closely represents the interests of the power elites that conserved their position when the transition from dictatorship to democracy was undertaken.
S.P.A.R.K. protest at cuts to lone parents, Dublin 18th February 2012
Many families were cut in the last budget but lone parent families were particularly hit by the Fine Gael/Labour Party government.
The key elements are that single parents can’t take advantage of training such as Community Employment (CE) Schemes and when the youngest child turns 7 years old, the parent is declassed as a lone parent but treated as an ordinary worker even though there are few affordable creche places. There is a bill coming up in March which will copper fasten some of the worst elements of government plans.
There is particular anger directed at the Labour Party because they are associated with women’s rights and a more progressive society.
Please share the link to this video
Exiting the euro | Michael Roberts
Michael Roberts argues that those in Greece who cite the example of Argentina when suggesting that Greece should leave the Euro are not necessarily looking at the whole picture. The situations are not the same, Roberts points out, citing Argentina’s former central bank governor at the time, Mario Blejer and his recent piece in the Financial Times. He also points to research based on the the experience of five recent devaluations of economies in crisis (including that of Argentina) which “shows that they lead to a 10-20% fall in real GDP and take five to ten years to recover to previous real GDP levels. But that is not to say that there is no alternative to “lowering wages, privatising the state sector, reducing taxes for the corporate sector (especially big business) and ‘deregulating’ labour markets i.e. the super-exploitation of the Greek people to raise profitability.”
But the left could also find an alternative policy to exiting the euro where Greece negotiates a full default on its debt to private and foreign bondholders; takes over the banks; and uses the savings from bond and interest repayments (€17-20bn a year) to start state directed investment in jobs, technology and funding small businesses, while staying in the euro to protect the savings of the people from destruction, keeping down inflation and avoiding a rise in foreign debt. The question of exiting the euro then becomes an issue for the Euro leaders to impose (and to be resisted by a campaign within Europe), not as the main policy plank of the left.
Corporate tax avoidance: where are the worst offenders?
This table comes via the Tax Justice Network (and Richard Murphy). It’s from a table produced by U.S. researcher Kimberly Clausing and as TJN notes “demonstrates which countries are working hardest to wage economic warfare on the United States (and, by extension, on other countries,) via the global tax system”.
Solidarity campaign to support the people of Greece
Mikis Theodorakis, famous Greek composer of Zorba’s Dance, and Manolis Glezos, veteran resistance fighter against the Nazi occupation, have issued a call for a European Front to defend the people of Greece and all those facing austerity. We have decided to support this call and work with trade unions, campaigns and parties across Europe to establish a European Solidarity Campaign to defend the people of Greece. We will organise solidarity and raise practical support for the people of Greece; they cannot be made to pay for a crisis for which they are not responsible.
Chris Dillow | Capitalism against freedom
[...]
During the Cold War, opponents of communism routinely, and not entirely wrongly, claimed to be champions of liberty. Freedom for capitalists and freedom of speech and thought go together, it was claimed. “Freedom is indivisible” wrote Bruce Winton Knight in 1952. “Economic freedom is…an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom“ wrote Milton Friedman in Capitalism and Freedom. And back in 1944 Friedrich Hayek complained that “We have progressively abandoned that freedom in economic affairs without which personal and political freedom has never existed in the past.”
Today, though, this seems wrong. Many threats to freedom come from capitalists. The story is no longer capitalism and freedom, but capitalism against freedom.
Ian Stewart | The mathematical equation that caused the banks to crash
In The Observer, Sunday 12 February 2012
Anyone who has followed the crisis will understand that the real economy of businesses and commodities is being upstaged by complicated financial instruments known as derivatives. These are not money or goods. They are investments in investments, bets about bets. Derivatives created a booming global economy, but they also led to turbulent markets, the credit crunch, the near collapse of the banking system and the economic slump. And it was the Black-Scholes equation that opened up the world of derivatives.
The equation itself wasn’t the real problem. It was useful, it was precise, and its limitations were clearly stated. It provided an industry-standard method to assess the likely value of a financial derivative. So derivatives could be traded before they matured. The formula was fine if you used it sensibly and abandoned it when market conditions weren’t appropriate. The trouble was its potential for abuse. It allowed derivatives to become commodities that could be traded in their own right. The financial sector called it the Midas Formula and saw it as a recipe for making everything turn to gold. But the markets forgot how the story of King Midas ended.
Greece: a Sisyphean task | Michael Roberts
In a Eurozone that is unwilling to share its surplus with weaker, hardest hit economies there is no other option for those economies but default. Despite the agreement of Greek politicians to shorten their political life and accept the deal all that they have done is simply postpone this eventuality once again. However, even that postponement might be shortened by the Greek elections in April where the smaller leftist parties outside the coalition currently have 40% of the vote. Or so says Michael Roberts:
Whatever the Greek coalition leaders agree to and try to implement, such is the weakness of Greek capitalism, it will not be able to meet its fiscal targets or get its debt down to reasonable levels. Before the end of the year, the Troika will have to report that Greece is not delivering. Then the EU leaders will have to decide whether they ‘let Greece go’ or not. The EU leaders have agreed to more money for Greece (or more accurately its bondholders and banks) in return for draconian cuts in living standards in order to provide more time to try and ‘ring-fence’ other vulnerable Eurozone states like Portugal and Ireland (where they are preparing extra funding). So when Greece goes down, it will not affect the rest (or so the EU leaders hope). Of course, the Greek people may force the issue earlier if they vote in an anti-Troika government in April.
As Greece stares into the abyss, Europe must choose | Maria Margaronis
Do we really want to live in an economic union that must destroy the future of millions in order to just tick along? Maria Margaronis points out that the situation in Greece today says little about Greece and everything about the EU.
The trouble with historical metaphors is that they can obscure the present: what’s really at stake here is not Greece’s identity but Europe’s. All eyes are fixed on Athens, but the way out of the crisis requires a choice about what kind of Europe we want. The one we have now, with its deep structural inequalities and its rigid adherence to a failed economic ideology, protects neither democracy nor human rights. Stiff-necked and punitive, it prefers to eat its children.
Comment by: Robert H Stiver
Dec 11th 2010 at 06:12
From faraway Hawaii, USA, I’ve just read Raymond Deane’s superlative review of Mr. Cronin’s “Europe’s Alliance With Israel.” I’m made to want to purchase and peruse the book, with a personal objective of comparing and contrasting the EU’s subservience to Zionist Israel against the cowardly, genuflecting, next-to-treasonous, justice-be-damned obeisance granted to the Zionist state by my own country’s leadership (sic).
One addition I’d suggest to Mr. Deane’s overview: I’m taken by his use of “transnational madness” in the paragraph beginning “Clearly EU backing for Israel….” “Collective psychosis” is the term by which I’ve come to characterize the entire present fabric of the Zionist ideology…manipulation, vast arrogance, denial, lies, diversions, disproportionate and inhuman violence visited on others are all symptoms. I believe that Mr. Deane’s paragraph would be more graphically concluded with something like “…a criminal conspiracy based in and fueled by a full-blown Zionist psychosis which, unless clearly diagnosed and resolutely treated, bodes extreme danger for the endlessly tormented people of Palestine and for the rest of humankind.”
Comment by: William Wall
Dec 11th 2010 at 11:12
‘In wishing Ireland a speedy recovery, we are confident that the people of Ireland will never allow the circumstances of the meltdown -reportedly extortionate bank fees, obscene bonuses and mismanagement - to be camouflaged by anti-Semitism”, Samuels added.’ (Simon Wiesenthal Centre denounces Dublin book launch, European Jewish Press.)
I just wonder how self-obsessed the Wiesenthal Centre has to be to think that we’re here in Ireland blaming the Elders of Zion or some other pernicious anti-semitic conspiracy for the collapse of the economy. I’ve heard everybody blamed, from the people themselves to the people who actually did it (FF), and in all that time I have seen not a single article, nor overheard a single discussion, about whether or not it’s all caused by the Protocol of the Elders of Zion.
The Israelis and their advocates are forever making such wild leaps from political criticism to anti-Jewish racism. The logic here seems to be: An Irishman publishes a book about the political links between the EU and Israel. The book is launched in Ireland. In Ireland the economy is collapsing. Therefore the book blames Jews for the collapse. That’s supposed to be logic.
Anyway, for anyone interested in how the Israelis view the occupation, there’s an interesting (if rather old) article by the novelist Linda Grant at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/oct/24/israelandthepalestinians.middleeast
Linda Grant hates the occupation but was researching the Israeli viewpoint for a book. I think it’s an interesting insight into the psychology, and concludes on the point that, in essence, the poverty of the Palestinians is not a weapon to use against the Israeli Government but the strongest weapon that the government has in continuing the oppression.
Comment by: Pope Epopt
Dec 11th 2010 at 18:12
This book seems timely - I have always felt that the EU relationship is the weakest part of Israeli foreign policy and can profitably be chipped away at by those who want to see a just solution, especially in key states like Germany.
The tedious and predictable conflation of criticism of Israeli policy with antisemitism damage damages global Jewry. This blurring of the category of antisemitism has the effect of disabling opposition to the real antisemitism that certainly hasn’t gone away, especially in Eastern Europe.
One day I may even be able to afford to buy the book! A web published book might be within the reach of all of us.