BOOKS: Exposé Questions EU's Role as 'Honest Broker' in Mideast
Sixty-five years ago, six million Jews perished in concentration camps across Nazi Germany, while the rest of Europe watched silently. Today, says political journalist David Cronin, the world is again witnessing what he calls Europe's 'blood-soaked foreign policy' in the Middle East, where billions of Euros are enabling Israel's illegal and inhumane occupation of Palestine.
In his recent book 'Europe's Alliance with Israel: Aiding the Occupation', Cronin delves into the intricacies of the lucrative fellowship between the 63-year-old Zionist state and the old anti-Semitic world powers, namely Germany, Britain, France and Italy.
Cronin's book takes as its starting point the European Union (EU)'s carefully constructed official image as a fair and unbiased peace broker in the Middle East.
'I first visited Israel in 2001 as a journalist reporting on a so-called peace mission of the EU, shortly after the Sep. 11 attacks,' Cronin told IPS.
'I attended a press conference in East Jerusalem given by Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister at the time, and I was deeply shocked by the level of arrogance and vitriol that he displayed by welcoming people to the 'Jewish Capital' without acknowledging that Jerusalem was an equally important place for the other great monotheistic religions in the world,' he said.
'At this time, I was still prepared to accept at face value the position of the EU as an honest broker,' Cronin added. 'But then in 2007 I attended a press conference in Brussels, and during a session that specifically addressed Europe's relationship with Israel I learned in black and white terms that Israel was, for all intensive purposes, a member of the EU.'
Struck by the dearth of comprehensive literature and research on the subject of this 'unholy alliance' between 'moral' Western nations and a country whose flouting of international law has made it by definition a 'rogue state', Cronin began compiling an exhaustive account of Europe's complicity and hypocrisy in the Middle East.
The book explores the relationship from myriad angles, beginning with the 'charm offensive' Israeli diplomats launched following the 2009 war in Gaza, or Operation Cast Lead, which included a massive media campaign preserving the myth of Israel's vulnerability (despite being the second largest military force in the world) in the face of Palestinian 'aggression'.
At a time when the international community was nearly united in its outrage (the United States being an exception, of course), Cronin details how Europe's leading heads of state pandered to Israel's media machine with statements condemning rocket attacks and threats to Israel's security.
'The corporate media in Europe was very culpable in this respect,' Cronin told IPS. 'The BBC, for example, is petrified of saying anything that can be construed in any way as critical of Israel.'
'After the attack on the Gaza freedom flotilla in 2010, the BBC's documentary by its panorama team was so biased against the activists on board the flotilla it could easily have been made by the Israeli embassy in London,' he added. 'The BBC's cowardice is a direct response to the lobby in Britain.'
The shared obsession with 'security' has birthed an enormous trade in surveillance technology between Israel and its allies in Europe. Cronin writes about the Lisbon strategy of 2007, during which the EU committed to dedicating three percent of its GDP to scientific research and development (R&D).
While the EU itself has struggled to meet that target, Israel has surpassed it, making it the first non-EU member to be welcomed into the seemingly innocuous arena of research, which currently enjoys a budget of 53 billion Euros.
The benevolence of this partnership is dispelled by Cronin's detailed analysis of how R&D is being applied. In his chapter 'The Misapplication of Science', Cronin exposes the EU's partner firms like Motorola Israel and EU-funded projects such as Foresight of Evolving Security Threats Posed by Emerging Technologies (FESTOS) and Innovative and Novel First Responders Application (INFRA) as being dedicated to the development and deployment of military intelligence, which is likely illegal under the many EU laws guiding the practice of R&D.
The billions of Euros being pumped into Israel's war economy generate huge revenue for the state. Not only do Israeli firms profit from the arms and technology trade, making Israel virtually immune to dips and plunges in the global economy, this money has facilitated unprecedented growth in Israel's 'matrix of control' over the scattered, ransacked Palestinian territories.
Cronin quotes activist and anthropologist Jeff Halper as saying, 'Israel's network of settlements and restrictions of movement [have] left Palestinians hemmed into small pieces of their native land.'
Unless this apartheid-like system of land-control is dismantled, Cronin writes, a two-state solution can never be realised.
© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service