MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: Julian Assange: True Journalism on Trial II

After hearing four weeks of “evidence” in the extradition trial of Julian Assange, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser announced earlier this month she will pronounce judgement on January 4.

The WikiLeaks founder’s trial in London’s Central Criminal Court, also known as the Old Bailey, started on September 7.

Australian-born Assange has been charged under the US’s 1917 Espionage Act for “unlawfully obtaining and disclosing classified documents related to the national defence”.

The case marks the first time in United States history that publishing information is being charged under the Espionage Act.

Assange, 49, has been indicted on 17 spying charges and one charge of computer hacking regarding the publication of secret military documents.

The hacking charge was included recently – meaning that the defence had no witness to appropriately deal with the hacking allegations.

Meanwhile, the silence of journalists in Britain, in the US, and in the mainstream media in general over the extradition proceedings against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is making them complicit in the criminalisation of newsgathering by the American government.

In an Old Bailey courtroom in London over the past four weeks, lawyers for the US government have sought the extradition of Assange to the US to face 17 charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 and one charge of computer misuse. At the heart of their case is the accusation that in leaking a trove of classified US diplomatic and military cables in 2010, Assange and WikiLeaks endanger the lives of US agents and informants.

One of the many peculiarities in this strange case is that the evidence for any such thing is non-existent. The Pentagon has admitted that it failed to find a single person covertly working for the US who had been killed as a result of the WikiLeaks disclosures. This failure was not for lack of trying: The Pentagon had set up a special military task force, deploying 120 counter-intelligence officers, to find at least one death that could be blamed on Assange and his colleagues but had found nothing.

Other allegations against Assange put forward by the lawyers for the US government are similarly flimsy or demonstrably false, yet he is still in real danger of being sent to a maximum security prison in the US after the court makes its ruling on 4 January. Once there he faces a sentence of up to 175 years and, whatever the length of his incarceration, he is likely to spend it in solitary confinement in a tiny cell.

The Assange case creates a precedent that mortally threatens freedom of the press in Britain. If Assange is extradited then any journalist who publishes information that the American authorities deem to be classified, however well-known or harmless it may be, will risk being extradited to face trial in America. The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, says that non-Americans like Assange do not enjoy First Amendment rights to free expression.

The outcome of the Assange extradition hearing is a crucial tipping point which will tell if Britain and the US go further down the same path towards “illiberal democracy” as Turkey, Hungary, Brasil, India and the Philippines. What Julian Assange and WikiLeaks did – obtaining important information about the deeds and misdeeds of the US government and giving that information to the public – is exactly what all journalists ought to do.

Journalism is all about disclosing important news to people so they can judge what is happening in the world – and the actions of their government in particular. The WikiLeaks disclosures in 2010 only differed from other great journalistic scoops in that they were bigger – 251,287 diplomatic cables, more than 400,000 classified army reports from the Iraq War and 90,000 from the Afghan War – and they were more important. [Full disclosure: I gave a statement read out in court this week seeking to explain the significance of the Wikileaks revelations.]

Astonishingly, British and American commentators are in a state of denial when it comes to seeing that what happens to Assange could happen to them. They argue bizarrely that he is not a journalist, though the Trump administration implicitly accepts that he is one, since it is pursuing him for journalistic activities. The motive is openly political, one of the absurdities of the hearing being the pretence that Trump-appointed officials provide a reliable and objective guide to the threat to the US posed by the WikiLeaks revelations.

Why has the British media been so mute about the grim precedent being established for themselves, were they to investigate the doings of a US government that makes no secret of its hostility to critical journalism. Ten years ago, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El Pais published extracts from the WikiLeak documents on their front pages for days on end, but they long ago distanced themselves from its founder. Yet, however much they may wish the contrary, their future is wrapped up in his fate.

Alan Rusbridger, the former Guardian editor under whom the cables and war logs were printed, made this clear in an interview, saying that he had no doubt about the damage being done to freedom of the press. “Whatever we think of Assange,” he said, “what he is being targeted for is the same or similar [to what] many journalists have done, then it’s surprising to me that more people can’t see that this case has worrying implications for all journalists.”

The danger to a genuinely free press is, indeed, so glaring that it is a mystery why the media has, by and large, ignored the issue. Coronavirus is a contributory reason, but treating Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as pariahs long predates the epidemic. Pundits wonder if he is a journalist at all, though he is clearly a journalist of the electronic age, publishing raw information in a different way from traditional newspapers, radio and television. His politics are unashamedly radical, which further alienates many commentators.

Far more important, however, in converting Julian Assange from being portrayed as a heroic fighter against state secrecy into a figure beyond the pale, were the allegations of rape made against him in Sweden in 2010. This led to a Swedish prosecutorial investigation that continued for nine years, was dropped three times and three times restarted, before being finally abandoned last year as the statute of limitations approached. Assange was never charged with anything and none of this has anything to do with the extradition hearings, but it helps explain why so much of the media has ignored or downplayed the Old Bailey hearings. Many on the political right always believed that Assange belonged in jail and many progressives felt that the rape allegations alone made him anathema.

Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon papers to the media in 1971, gave evidence to the court that he had leaked the secret history of the Vietnam War to show the public that the war was continuing though its perpetrators knew it could not be won. He said that Julian Assange had done much the same, this time in relation to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Pentagon Papers and the WikiLeaks disclosures were similar in every way.

The saga of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks is now so long and complicated that it is worth reminding oneself of the piercing light they cast on the US government’s activities in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. I myself first used the material from the disclosures in the summer of 2010 to explain why the Afghan government, supported by 90,000 US troops, was not winning a war that Washington claimed was in defence of democracy.

I quoted a report from an American civil affairs official in Gardez, Afghanistan, in 2007, who said that he had been bluntly informed by a member of the Afghan provincial council in the town that “the general view of the Afghans is that the current government is worse than the Taliban”. The US official lamented that this was all too true. Why this was so was explained by another US report dated 22 October 2009, this time from Balkh in northern Afghanistan, which described how Afghan soldiers and police were mistreating local civilians who refused to cooperate in a search. I wrote how the official US report said that “a district police chief raped a 16-year-old girl and when a civilian protested the police chief ordered his bodyguard to shoot him. The bodyguard refused and was himself killed by the police chief.”

Such revelations explain why the Afghan war is still going on and tens of thousands more people have died – and why the US government is so keen to put Julian Assange in jail for the rest of his life.

“Faced with a barrage of criticism from some of his followers, George Monbiot, the Guardian’s supposedly fearless, leftwing columnist, offered up two extraordinarily feeble excuses for failing to provide more than cursory support for Julian Assange over the past month, as the Wikileaks founder has endured extradition hearings in a London courtroom.

The Trump administration wants Assange brought to the United States to face espionage charges that could see him locked away in a super-max prison on “special administrative measures”, unable to have meaningful contact with any other human being for the rest of his life. And that fate awaits him only because he embarrassed the US by exposing its war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq in the pages of newspapers like the New York Times and Guardian – and because Washington fears that Assange, if left free, would publish more disturbing truths about US actions around the globe.

But there is much more at stake than simply Assange’s rights being trampled on. He is not simply the western equivalent of Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and dissident who notably offered his own support to Assange during the hearings. Weiwei covered his mouth outside the Old Bailey courtroom in protest at the media’s blanket silence over the crimes being perpetrated against Assange.

Assange faces a terrifying new kind of extraordinary rendition – one conducted not covertly by US security services but in the full glare of publicity and, if the London court approves, with the consent of the British judiciary. If extradition is authorised, a precedent will be set that allows the US to seize and jail any journalist who exposes its crimes. Inevitably, that will have a severe chilling effect on all journalists investigating the world’s only super-power. It will not only be the death of journalism’s already enfeebled role as a watchdog on power but a death blow against our societies’ commitment to the principles of freedom and openness.

This should be reason enough for anyone to be deeply concerned about Assange’s extradition hearing, most especially journalists. And even more so a journalist like Monbiot, whose work’s lifeblood is the investigation of unaccountable power and its corrosive effects. If any British journalist ought to be shouting from the rooftops against Assange’s extradition, it is Monbiot.

And yet, he has failed to write a single column in the Guardian on Assange, and in response to mounting criticism from followers pointed to three retweets backing Assange during the past four weeks of extradition hearings. All three, we should note, were of articles published in his own newspaper, the Guardian, that broke with its hostile coverage and could be considered vaguely sympathetic to Assange.

This was the barest minimum that Monbiot could afford to be seen doing. After all, positioned as the Guardian’s leftwing conscience, it would have been strange indeed had he not retweeted the rare instances, in a sea of Guardian articles ridiculing and vilifying Assange, of the paper making a nod to its more leftwing readers.

But notably, Monbiot failed to retweet any of the daily articles posted by former UK ambassador Craig Murray that detailed the horrifying abuses of legal process against Assange during the extradition hearings as well as evidence from expert witness after expert witness that demolished the central claims of the US case. Monbiot did not retweet any of the articles or comments by the renowned investigative journalist John Pilger, who has been a stalwart defender of Assange.

He did not retweet the testimony of Noam Chomsky, the celebrated linguist and political analyst, that the US charges against Assange are entirely political in nature and therefore void the US extradition request. Monbiot has similarly ignored the comments of Nils Melzer, the United Nations’ expert on torture, that Assange is already being psychologically tortured by the combined actions of the UK and US to keep him locked up in extreme isolation and in a prolonged state of chronic fear for his future.

Monbiot also did not retweet the astounding evidence last week from a former employee of the Spanish company that provided security at the Ecuadorian embassy, where Assange spent seven years in political asylum. The whistleblower testified that under CIA direction the company broke the law by surveilling Assange, even in the toilet block, and listened in to his privileged conversations with his lawyers. This fact alone should have been enough to force the presiding judge, Vanessa Baraitser, to rule against the US extradition request.

No, Monbiot told his followers about none of these developments or about much more that has emerged over the past four weeks. Instead he offered two cowardly excuses for why he has remained so mealymouthed at the worst assault on press freedom in living memory.

The first was that the Assange extradition hearing apparently isn’t important enough. It is simply “one of hundreds of crucial issues” and “compared to say, soil loss, it’s way down my list”.

No one can doubt that Monbiot rightly takes environmental issues extremely seriously. But he doesn’t just tweet and write about the environment. There are many others issues, entirely unconnected to the environment and of which he appears to know almost nothing, that he regularly writes about.

One will suffice as illustrative. For the past two years Monbiot has dedicated a great deal of time and energy – time and energy he has refused to expend on defending Assange and press freedom – to attack those who have questioned claims by the US and UK intelligence services that the Syrian government under Bashar Assad carried out a chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018. The supposed attack provided the pretext for the US to launch a bombing attack on Syria – an example of a supreme international crime, according to the Nuremberg principles.

Monbiot has tried to intimidate into silence those, including whistleblowers from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), who have suggested that in fact the evidence points to jihadist groups being responsible for what happened in Douma. Those jihadists – labelled “terrorists” by the western media in all countries other than Syria – have been explicitly financed by western allies like Saudi Arabia, and more covertly by the west itself. Nonetheless, Monbiot has smeared anyone sceptical of the official western narrative about Douma as an “Assad apologist”, including by implication the distinguished Middle East reporter Robert Fisk, who, unlike Monbiot, actually visited Douma.

Monbiot has no expertise on the Middle East, and presumably has drawn his conclusions from reading the Syria coverage of the Guardian, whose positions he precisely echoes. It is bad enough that he has used his platform to go on the offensive against those taking a critical position on the events in Douma. But worse still, he has swept up in his smear campaign whistleblowers from the OPCW, the United Nations’ chemical weapons watchdog body, who have been warning that the OPCW is no longer independent but has become a deeply politicised body that tampered with the inspectors’ findings in the Douma case to bolster Washington’s self-serving agenda in Syria.

The whistleblowers’ claims are hardly out of line with the wider picture of the OPCW. The organisation has been falling under Washington’s thumb for nearly two decades. The previous head of the OPCW, Jose Bustani, was forced out by the Bush administration after he sought to negotiate further weapons inspections of Iraq to deprive the US of a pretext to launch its illegal invasion in 2003. Angry that US plans for regime change might be disrupted, John Bolton, the warmongering US ambassador to the UN, even threatened Bustani: “We know where your kids live.”

At least three members of the OPCW team that investigated the Douma events have tried to warn that the evidence blaming Assad was doctored by the organisation’s officials and that their own research showed that the most likely culprit were jihadist groups – who presumably hoped to engineer a pretext for more direct western intervention in Syria to help them bring down the Syrian government.

Misinformation around the Douma events has grown so dire that Bustani himself recently tried to intervene on behalf of the whistleblowers at the Security Council. He noted in testimony blocked by the US and UK: “At great risk to themselves, they [the whistleblowers] have dared to speak out against possible irregular behaviour in your Organisation [the OPCW].” He added: “Hearing what your own inspectors have to say would be an important first step in mending the Organisation’s damaged reputation.”

There are plenty of reasons, therefore, to criticise Monbiot for his smearing of the Douma sceptics and the OPCW whistleblowers. But I am not interested here in revisiting the Douma episode. The point I am making relates to Assange.

In asserting that he doesn’t have time to defend Assange, Monbiot is implicitly arguing that opposing the current all-out war by the US on journalism is a lower priority than his smearing of the OPCW whistleblowers; that bullying and silencing Douma sceptics is one of those “hundreds of crucial issues” more important than preventing Assange from spending the rest of his life in jail, and more important than saving investigative journalism from this gravest of assaults by the US.

To understand how absurd Monbiot’s argument is, let us note that the only way we can ever properly settle the Douma case – without regurgitating claims by the US and UK intelligence services, as Monbiot has been doing – is if someone manages to leak the classified communications on Douma between the US administration and the OPCW leadership. That would let us know whether it is the OPCW whistleblowers telling the truth or the suits in head office. The whistleblowers have already stated that US officials turned up at an OPCW meeting unannounced and in violation of the body’s independent status in a bid to lean on staff.

The only way we will learn the truth with any certainty is if there is a leak of documents – to an organisation like Assange’s group Wikileaks.

The war on Assange has not only been a war on journalism. It is also a war on the whistleblowers who have assisted journalists and Wikileaks in arriving at the truth. Hanging on the outcome of Assange’s case is not only his personal fate, but journalism’s very ability to tap into sources close to the centres of power. In abandoning Assange, we abandon any hope of finding out the truth on a whole range of the most pressing issues facing us.

If Monbiot hopes to be able to campaign more effectively on “hundreds of crucial issues” like soil loss and other environmental concerns, he needs Assange and Wikileaks as vigorous as possible, not Assange locked away in a dark cell and Wikileaks a shadow of the organisation it once was.

Monbiot, of course, does not need me to tell him all this. He understands it already. Which is why his behaviour needs explaining – a matter we will get to in a minute.

Monbiot claims he cannot add anything “original” to what has been said already about the Assange case and that “It’s not about ticking boxes” but about “expanding the field”.

Let us set aside the obvious lacuna in this argument: that Monbiot has been ticking every box imaginable on the Douma incident. He added precisely nothing to the debate apart from his own smears of the whistleblowers. All he did was echo the intelligence services’ talking points, which had already been given an extensive and uncritical airing in the Guardian.

So Monbiot is quite clearly capable of being highly unoriginal when he chooses to be.

But there are, of course, lots of original things Monbiot could contribute to the coverage of the Assange case in his own newspaper, the Guardian, given that the only people speaking up for Assange – apart from one article by Patrick Cockburn in the Independent – have been outside the “mainstream”, without a platform in the corporate media.

Monbiot could have served as a counterweight to the relentless maligning of Assange in the Guardian’s pages by pointing out how these smears were unfounded. Instead he has either echoed those smears, or equivocated on them, or remained silent. He could have, for example, observed that there were very good grounds for Assange to seek political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, as the extradition hearings have confirmed, in contrast to the constant claims in the Guardian that Assange was “fleeing rape charges” – charges that existed only in the imagination of newspaper editors – or that he was paranoid and arrogant.

Or Monbiot could have pointed out that the Guardian fabricated an easily disproved smear story that a Trump aide, Paul Manafort, and unnamed “Russians” had supposedly visited Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy in secret three times – without leaving any evidence, even though the embassy was the most heavily surveilled building in London, both inside and out.

The story, presumably provided to the Guardian on an unattributable basis by one of the security services involved, was published to ensnare Assange in evidence-free Russiagate claims and thereby alienate liberals so that they would not oppose the US extradition case. Monbiot could have added that the Guardian was wrong not to apologise for the deceitful, malicious report and retract it.*Or Monbiot could tell his readers that the Guardian is not declaring a glaring conflict of interest in its coverage of the Assange hearings. Rather than being a neutral observer of developments, the paper is in fact deeply implicated in the very charges levelled by the US against Assange. Its former investigations editor David Leigh was the one who recklessly published the password to a critically important trove of secret documents held by Wikileaks, giving every security service in the world access to them. Eventually, in a damage limitation operation, Wikileaks was forced to publish the files unredacted to let anyone named know they were in danger.

If anyone should be on trial for endangering US informants – no one should be, and no informants were harmed – it is not Assange but Leigh and other senior Guardian editors.

All of these would be highly “original” things for Monbiot to write about that would undoubtedly “expand the field”. But I am not really suggesting that he go so far as to be honest about the vile role played by his employer in selling out Assange. I am worldly enough to know how things work. He has a good, mainstream platform that weekly publishes his articles – and he does not want to jeopardise that by criticising his own newspaper.

But of course Monbiot does not need to criticise the Guardian to support Assange. There are plenty of other, important things to write about if he chooses to. The point is he chooses not to. The real question, once his pathetic excuses are stripped away, is why.

And that, sadly, is because Monbiot is not the free thinker, the fearless investigator of difficult truths, the leftwing conscience he claims to be. It is not really his fault. It is in the nature of the function he serves at the Guardian – and with which I am only too familiar myself from my years working there.

The Guardian is the main outlet of the Guardian Media Group, which depends on advertising to survive. It is a corporate venture premised on exploiting the Guardian’s market share to the greatest extent possible, just as the Daily Mail, the Sun and the Times do with their own markets. In this regard, newspapers are no different from supermarkets. If they fail to corner their section of the market, another corporation better suited to do so will step in and seize it from them.

Assange understood this only too well, as he explained in an interview back in 2011 after learning that the Guardian had been breaking its agreements with Wikileaks and sharing confidential files with others. He observed:

“What drives a paper like the Guardian or New York Times is not their inner moral values. It is simply that they have a market. In the UK, there is a market called ‘educated liberals’. Educated liberals want to buy a newspaper like the Guardian and therefore an institution arises to fulfil that market.”

Most of the Guardian’s writers pander squarely to the general “educated liberals” market. But some, like Monbiot, are there with a more specific purpose: to mop up sections of the population that might otherwise stray from the Guardian fold.

Owen Jones is there to mop up leftwing supporters of the Labour party to persuade them that the Guardian is their friend, as he continued to do even while the paper was helping to destroy the party’s elected leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Jonathan Freedland is there, in part, to reassure liberal Jews that the Guardian is on their side, which he did by playing up the evidence-free smears that Labour had an especial antisemitism problem under Corbyn. Hadley Freeman is there, as are others like Suzanne Moore, to represent liberal women deeply invested in identity politics and to make sure they keep them away from class politics.

The point is that the Guardian is a corporate endeavour that makes sure its columnists cover as many liberal-left bases as possible without allowing any really subversive voices a platform from which they can challenge or disrupt the neoliberal status quo.

Monbiot, therefore, treads the finest line of all the Guardian’s columnists. His position is the most absurd, the one plagued with the biggest internal contradiction: he must sell extreme environmental concern from within a newspaper that is entirely embedded in the economic logic of the very neoliberal system that is destroying the planet.

The Guardian understands its own urgent need to greenwash too. Its market, educated liberals, are increasingly frightened by the multiple environmental threats we face, which is why very belatedly – decades late, in fact – the paper has been prioritising this issue above all others.

But of course, given the logic of its corporate, money-making, advertiser-driven agenda, the Guardian is not just highlighting the threat to the environment to win over more educated liberals. It is also monetising this threat for itself as aggressively as it can. It did so again this week as its editor, Kath Viner, appealed to educated liberals to make a subscription donation to the paper based on the claim that it will campaign to protect the environment better than any other UK newspaper. That, of course, is a remarkably low bar it has set for itself.

Monbiot is trapped in this same logic: campaigning for the environment from within an organisation whose economic imperatives are designed to trash the planet.

He treads this very fine line by deviating as little as necessary from the Guardian’s own narrow, status quo-hugging agenda. He enjoys the freedom to speak out loudly on the dangers of environmental destruction, but that freedom comes at a price – that he closely adhere to the technocratic, liberal consensus on other issues. The paradox is that on foreign policy matters we have Monbiot effectively colluding in the propaganda of the west’s war industries – the most polluting on the planet – as he professes his environmental credentials to the Guardian’s liberal readers.

This stance is not imposed on him. He does not receive orders from Guardian editors to smear OPCW whistleblowers or to restrain himself from tweeting forthright support for Assange. Instead he has imbibed the corporate culture of the Guardian – as I once did, as most of us do in our daily lives – as a sanity survival strategy, as way to placate the cognitive dissonance that would overwhelm him if he did not.

Paradoxically, the two excuses he offered justifying his lack of support for Assange followed a tweet in which he had just castigated the left – as he is wont to do when confronted with evidence he would rather not hear – for preferring conformity over solidarity.

I’m no psychologist, but this sounds suspiciously like projection to me. Monbiot was immediately and rightly pulled up by followers who pointed out that, in his abandonment of Assange, he had once again shown a high degree of conformity to official, intelligence agency-serving narratives, as well as to those of his employer, the Guardian. He had also shown a very low degree of solidarity with a man who has almost single-handedly taken on the western power establishment in the hope of helping us finally to hold it to account.

Ultimately, the problem lies not with Monbiot. He is just serving the market, attracting socially responsible liberals to the Guardian, rationalising the paper’s reformist agenda within a suicidal, global, neoliberal economy, and preventing leftwingers from straying too far, to the point where they might contemplate a more revolutionary form of politics.

The problem lies not with Monbiot. It lies with us. We continue to ignore the fact that we are being played by the system, that we are being placated by pale offerings like Monbiot, that our consent is needed and that we keep finding reasons to give it rather than withdraw it. Neither Monbiot nor the Guardian is going to liberate our minds. Only we can do that. »

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jonathan-cook.net/

PALESTINA

Rim Banna : The voice of Palestine

In theory, Europe and the United States stand on completely opposite sides when it comes to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. While the US government has fully embraced the tragic status quo created by 53 years of Israeli military occupation, the EU continues to advocate a negotiated settlement that is predicated on respect for international law.

In practice, however, despite the seeming rift between Washington and Brussels, the outcome is, essentially, the same. The US and Europe are Israel’s largest trade partners, weapon suppliers and political advocates.

One of the reasons that the illusion of an even-handed Europe has been maintained for so long lies partly in the Palestinian leadership itself. Politically and financially abandoned by Washington, the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas has turned to the European Union as its only possible saviour.

“Europe believes in the two-state solution,” PA Prime Minister, Mohammad Shtayyeh, said during a video discussion with the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs on October 12. Unlike the US, Europe’s continued advocacy of the defunct two-state solution qualifies it to fill the massive gap created by Washington’s absence.

Shtayyeh called on EU leaders to “recognize the State of Palestine in order for us, and you, to break the status quo.”

However, there are already 139 countries that recognize the State of Palestine. While that recognition is a clear indication that the world remains firmly pro-Palestinian, recognizing Palestine as a State changes little on the ground. What is needed are concerted efforts to hold Israel accountable for its violent occupation as well as real action to support the struggle of Palestinians.

Not only has the EU failed at this, it is, in fact, doing the exact opposite: funding Israel, arming its military and silencing its critics.

Listening to Shtayyeh’s words, one gets the impression that the top Palestinian official is addressing a conference of Arab, Muslim or socialist countries. “I call upon your Parliament and your distinguished Members of this Parliament, that Europe not wait for the American President to come up with ideas … We need a third party who can really remedy the imbalance in the relationship between an occupied people and an occupier country, that is Israel,” he said.

But is the EU qualified to be that ‘third party’? No. For decades, European governments have been an integral part of the US-Israel party. Just because the Donald Trump administration has, recently, taken a sharp turn in favour of Israel should not automatically transform Europe’s historical pro-Israel bias to be mistaken for pro-Palestinian solidarity.

Last June, more than 1,000 European parliamentarians representing various political parties issued a statement expressing “serious concerns” about Trump’s so-called Deal of the Century and opposing Israeli annexation of nearly a third of the West Bank. However, the pro-Israel US Democratic Party, including some traditionally staunch supporters of Israel, were equally critical of Israel’s plan because, in their minds, annexation means that a two-state solution would be made impossible.

While US Democrats made it clear that a Joe Biden administration would not reverse any of Trump’s actions should Biden be elected, European governments have also made it clear that they will not take a single action to dissuade – let alone punish – Israel for its repeated violations of international law.

Lip service is all that Palestinians have obtained from Europe, as well as much money, which was largely pocketed by loyalists of Abbas in the name of ‘State-building’ and other fantasies. Tellingly, much of the imaginary Palestinian State infrastructure that was subsidized by Europe in recent years has been blown up, demolished or construction ceased by the Israeli military during its various wars and raids. Yet, neither did the EU punish Israel, nor did the PA cease from asking for more money to continue funding a non-existent State.

Not only did the EU fail to hold Israel accountable for its ongoing occupation and human rights violations, it is practically financing Israel, as well. According to Defence News, a quarter of all of Israel’s military export contracts (totaling $7.2 billion in 2019 alone) is allocated to European countries.

Moreover, Europe is Israel’s largest trading partner, absorbing one-third of Israel’s total exports and shipping to Israel nearly 40% of its total import. These numbers also include products made in illegal Jewish settlements.

Additionally, the EU labours to incorporate Israel into the European way of life through cultural and music contests, sports competitions and in a myriad other ways. While the EU possesses powerful tools that can be used to exact political concessions and enforce respect for international law, it opts to simply do very little.

Compare this with the recent ultimatum the EU has given the Palestinian leadership, linking EU aid to the PA’s financial ties with Israel. Last May, Abbas took the extraordinary step of considering all agreements with Israel and the US to be null and void. Effectively, this means that the PA would no longer be accountable for the stifling status quo that was created by the Oslo Accords, which was repeatedly violated by Tel Aviv and Washington. Severing ties with Israel also meant that the PA would refuse to accept nearly $150 million in tax revenues that Israel collects on behalf of the PA. This Palestinian step, while long overdue, was necessary.

Instead of supporting Abbas’ move, the EU criticized it, refusing to provide additional aid for Palestinians until Abbas restores ties with Israel and accepts the tax money. According to Axios news portal, Germany, France, the UK and even Norway are leading the charge.

Germany, in particular, has been relentless in its support for Israel. For months, it has advocated on behalf of Israel to spare Tel Aviv a war crimes investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC). It has placed activists, who advocate the boycott of Israel, on trial. Recently, it has confirmed the shipment of missile boats and other military hardware to ensure the superiority of the Israeli navy in a potential war against Arab enemies. Germany is not alone. Israel and most European countries are closing ranks in terms of their unprecedented military cooperation and trade ties, including natural gas deals.

Continuing to make references to the unachievable two-state solution, while arming, funding and doing more business with Israel is the very definition of hypocrisy. The truth is that Europe should be held as accountable as the US in emboldening and sustaining the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Yet, while Washington is openly pro-Israel, the EU has played a more clever game: selling Palestinians empty words while selling Israel lethal weapons.

Ted Talks Ramallah : Rim Banna (in arabic)