Rights and Accountability 6 December 2023
Ursula von der Leyen stresses her devotion to the arms industry. (European Defence Agency)
Spare us the sham heroics of Samantha Power.
With a depressing sense of inevitability, the USAID boss flew to Egypt this week. The plane taking her was supposedly full of aid for Gaza’s displaced people.
With all that generosity, we are supposed to forget that the US is abetting genocide. Israel is committing a holocaust with American weapons.
Ursula von der Leyen is playing a similar game.
She is constantly pointing to the European Union’s “humanitarian assistance” for Palestinians, while stressing her full solidarity for Israel.
As we enter a season of goodwill, what could be kinder than giving a few tents to people whose homes have been destroyed with the EU’s encouragement?
Von der Leyen heads the EU’s executive, the European Commission.Under her leadership, the EU claims to have quadrupled its humanitarian assistance for Gaza.
Let us pause for a moment to ask if the quadrupling is as impressive as von der Leyen infers.
The latest published figure for EU humanitarian aid to Palestinians so far this year is approximately $111 million.
The aid may well go from a quadrupling to a quintupling or even a sextupling. But helping Palestinian victims of genocide will still be a very low priority for the European Union.
Von der Leyen proved where the real priority lies when she addressed a recent conference on bolstering the weapons industry.
The conference heard that EU military expenditure came to almost $260 billion in 2022.
The data presented at the conference did not give a precise breakdown of what equipment had been bought.
Yet it has been previously reported that Europe spent more than $3.6 billion on arms manufactured by Israel last year.
Without doubt, then, the amount which the EU hands over to Israel’s weapons industry far exceeds humanitarian aid for Palestinians.
As it boasts of compassion toward Palestinians, the European Commission has approved an unprecedented funding package for Israel.
With a total budget of over $19 million, the package aims to “reinforce EU-Israel bilateral relations.” Other objectives – though couched in different terms – are advancing the Abraham Accords, under which various Arab countries have normalized relations with Israel, and promoting Israel’s efforts to smear its critics as anti-Semites.
Over the past two months, the European Union’s support for Israel has become more pronounced than ever before. No amount of humanitarian aid can alter that fact.
