SANTIAGO GONZÁLEZ VALLEJO EU and Spain associated to war crimes

Santiago González Vallejo, 10/2/2025

The author is a Spanish economist who works at the Unión Sindical Obrera trade union and is a member and co-founder of the Comité de Solidaridad con la Causa Árabe (Arab Cause Solidarity Committee).

For many years now, we have accused the European Union of being an accomplice in the occupation and colonization of the Territories occupied by Israel (Palestine territory prior to 1967, the Syrian Golan Heights and the Shebaa Farms in Lebanon), as well as the blockade of Palestinian Gaza. This is confirmed by its global inaction and its de facto support for Israel in terms of arms trade, security agreements, maintenance of trade relations – including with the settlements in the Occupied Territory, in both directions – partnership in programs of all kinds or granting aid. All of this forces us to consider that the EU is not only complicit but also a party to Israel's war crimes and crimes against humanity.

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The European Union (as well as NATO), through these agreements, has been considering Israel as a partner, ally, etc., despite it being an occupying state with supremacist laws that discriminate against Palestinians and despise international law, including the right of return.  All of this is the origin and cause of the injustice suffered by the Palestinian people.  The European Union and other Western countries, by siding with Israel, are participants in the crimes of repression and continuous violence that Israel exercises to maintain that territorial domination.

An excuse sometimes alleged in the abandonment of accepted values of the European Union (such as the respect of international law, democracy or shared prosperity) is that many Europeans are trapped ideologically in accepting the Israeli narrative that they are the Jews who were massacred and discriminated against in the last century. But those Europeans who discriminated and massacred Jewish citizens of their own country, are not us, today’s Europeans. They were, generically, our ancestors. This leads us to ask questions such as: do today’s European have to pay for crimes that they did not commit, or are today’s Israelis victims of those atrocities?

Israelis cannot adduce that they are the same people as those Jews who suffered the Holocaust along with other groups. Nor can the actions of these Israelis against the Palestinians, with their occupation, colonization and supremacist laws, be justified based on the suffering and attempted annihilation of Jews by Nazi and fascist supremacist ideologies (now recreated by many European and Israeli parties).

Moreover, it is curious because we all know that the Zionist Jewish leaders, fathers of Israel, did not suffer, in their flesh, the crimes carried out by the Nazism of the time. David Yosef Grün (Ben Gurion), born Polish, Vladimir Yevgenyevich Jabotinsky, born in Russia, Chaim Azriel Weizmann, born in Belarus-Russia, or Golda Mabovitch (Golda Meir), born in the Russian Empire, in present-day Ukraine, did not suffer persecution in Nazi-fascist Europe.

But for their Zionist project, the creation of the ['Jewish'] State of Israel, born with the pretense that there would be no Arabs, they knew how to use the argument for both Jews and non-Jews,  that the project of Israel – prior to the Holocaust – was a consequence of having been victims of barbarism, and capitalized on the Nazi extermination against the Jews to legitimize their colonial Zionist ideology  at the expense of an indigenous Arab population that was not part of that European criminal machinery. If we have put the word 'Jewish' in quotation marks between State and Israel, it is because it characterizes the Zionist colonial and supremacist ideology, which survives in the majority of the Israeli population, its laws and in its Parliament.

Several factors converge, in a tortuous way, in the European Union, in the United Kingdom, in the United States, etc., so that colonial embers, of manifest destiny or chosen people that survive, are assumed and made their own, when in fact they are theocratic caricatures far from the humanist values that they preach to possess. But today we see the cracks in fallacies when, for example, we contemplate the unequal treatment that the European Union and Western countries have given to Russia's invasion of Ukraine compared to their taking sides with Israel, something that only highlights the cracks in their amoral discourse. This also affects the Spanish government, perhaps in a less ostentatious way than others, as its inconsistencies are still visible, signalled by its rapprochement with its US ally: but where are the sanctions on Israel?

Not all Jews, nor all Jewish Israelis, accept the manipulation by Israeli leaders and Zionists of any nationality, which is that being Jewish must mean defending Israel. Einstein, of German origin, refused to be citizen of Israel and remained a citizen of the United States which had welcomed him. There are multiple associations of Jews, including Israelis, who reject this Israel and even the logic of Israel's existence in the face of a Palestine in which everyone had the same rights and obligations. This has traditionally been the historical approach of the PLO, which has been rejected by Zionism.

Today, we are witnessing a profound dissociation between words and deeds. In the face of a prolonged Israeli occupation and colonization of the Occupied Territories, in the face of the possible accusation of genocide, the International Courts of Justice and the Criminal Court have demanded that States and any actors make efforts not to facilitate colonization and to cut off any economic or other initiative that promotes it. And that Netanyahu can be tried as an alleged war criminal and a criminal against humanity at the headquarters of the International Criminal Court.

In the face of Israeli occupation and colonization, the truth is that the current European authorities consider that they are doing everything right, they propose that trade with the settlements continue, that the programs and other protocols with the Israeli partner be maintained, hence they supervise that exist semantic differentiations between this Israel and the fictitious Israel prior to 1967. Regarding the arms trade, they declare that it is a matter for the member states, although they help Ukraine militarily, and that, of course, is considered European policy. On the other hand, both Poland, which currently holds the European six-month presidency, and Hungary, which previously held it, have declared that they will disregard international justice if it affects Israel, and have invited Netanyahu to their respective countries.

In other words, the European Union shapes the policy and is co-responsible for this Israel, despise the demands of an increasing number of European citizens.