David Cronin
The Electronic Intifada / July 15, 2024
Enabling a genocide is no obstacle to political longevity.
That is what Ursula von der Leyen will prove this week if she wins a vote allowing her to be reappointed head of the European Commission.
In October, von der Leyen offered her full backing to Israel at a time when it was killing a child in Gaza approximately every 15 minutes.
Those lawmakers who will endorse von der Leyen this coming Thursday will be dismissing that fact as insignificant.
Complicity in genocide is a crime. Yet international law is being tossed aside in the grubby horse trading through which the European Union’s top jobs are filled.
Von der Leyen has a record of pandering to extremists.
“Promoting our European way of life” became an official EU priority under her leadership. That was a coded way of saying that policies are being shaped by racism and xenophobia.
The “promoting our European way of life” portfolio was handed to Margaritis Schinas, a right-wing Greek official.
Including the fight against anti-Semitism within that portfolio was a gift to Israel and its lobbying network. Schinas has completely followed their sinister agenda of treating bigotry against Jews and solidarity with Palestinians as synonymous.
Through a freedom of information request, I have obtained several briefing documents prepared for Schinas since 7 October.
None of them contains any criticism toward Israel. Instead they present that state as a victim.
In the same week during May that Israel launched a ground invasion of Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, Schinas paid a visit to Aachen, Germany.
Schinas was there to speak at an award ceremony honoring one pro-Israel rabbi and “all the Jews of Europe.”
The framing of the event was in itself deeply problematic.
European Jews were depicted as homogenous. There was no recognition of how people identifying themselves as Jewish hold diverse opinions on many matters, including Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.
Memory hole
The speaking notes drafted for Schinas – see below – suggest that the Hamas-led operation of 7 October was a pogrom against Jews for being Jews. The decades of dispossession and violence endured by Palestinians before that date were sent down a memory hole.
“Every form of anti-Semitism is an attack on all of us and the model of society we represent,” according to those notes.
They do not specify what he meant by “every form of anti-Semtism.” But Schinas has previously conflated opposition to Israel and its state ideology Zionism with hatred of Jews.
Schinas has repeatedly shared platforms with Israel’s representatives amid the current genocide. Those representatives include Israel Katz, now the foreign minister.
The same Katz announced in October that Gaza’s people “will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world.”
The International Court of Justice referred directly to that warning when deciding in late January that South Africa’s case against Israel under the Genocide Convention was plausible. The ICJ’s interim ruling does not appear to have reduced Schinas’ support for Israel in any way.
His support has not gone unappreciated. In April, the Israel Economic Forum (IEF) wrote to Schinas, saying “we would like to explore your joining our World Leaders Cabinet,” which was described as an “exclusive advisory body.”
The letter – see below – summarized the IEF as “an elite membership organization of deeply committed pro-Israel CEOs, business executives and world leaders.”
The forum is one of many Israel lobby groups in contact with the European Union.
A new report on anti-Semitism published by the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency was written in close cooperation with the European Union for Progressive Judaism (EUPJ) – a pro-Israel group
Relying on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism – a definition drafted by pro-Israel lobbyists, the report presents boycotts organized by the Palestine solidarity movement and questioning Israel’s “right to exist” as motivated by anti-Jewish bigotry. The report does not address why a state founded on the mass expulsion of Palestinians should have any right to exist in the first place.
We can expect another five years of dangerous garbage if Ursula von der Leyen is reappointed. Shielding Israel has become integral to her project of “promoting our European way of life.”
David Cronin is an associate editor of The Electronic Intifada; his books include Balfour’s Shadow: A Century of British Support for Zionism and Israel and Europe’s Alliance with Israel: Aiding the Occupation
