Gaza starves as EU helps Israel to fight binge-eating

EU officials are now portraying genocide enabler Ursula von der Leyen as a champion of peace. (Dati Bendo / European Union)

As Gaza starved, the European Union decided to finance an Israeli project on binge-eating.

That fact says everything about the priorities of the Brussels bureaucracy and how it has continued cooperating with a state carrying out a genocide.

The binge-eating project is coordinated by the Weizmann Institute of Science. It is among the recipients of more than 150 grants to Israel which Brussels officials have signed since the exterminationist war on Gaza was declared in October last year.

I have found details of these grants by sifting through a database on EU research funding.

Binge-eating disorder is a serious problem that warrants careful research. Yet it is abhorrent that the EU should approve an Israeli project on overconsumption at a time when Israel had cut off the supply of food and water to Gaza’s inhabitants.

The grant to the binge-eating project reminded me of an 1890 cartoon captioned “Ireland wrestles with famine, while Mr. Balfour plays golf.”

Arthur James Balfour headed Britain’s colonial administration in Ireland during a period of mass hardship and considerable unrest. He would later ink the 1917 Balfour Declaration, through which Britain offered its support for the colonization of Palestine by the Zionist movement.

The colonization drive not only continues in 2024 but has become more brutal than ever. Despite professing varying degrees of concern about the brutality, the US, the European Union and Britain are all accommodating it.

Balfour was lampooned for not allowing the misery caused by Britain’s policies to put him off his hobbies. Today, the West’s decision-makers are so unperturbed by the horrors visited on Gaza that they maintain a business as usual approach toward Israel.

Memory hole

By compiling a list of recent EU grants to Israel, I found out that a few colleges have benefited considerably from them. They include Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Technion in Haifa and the aforementioned Weizmann Institute in Rehovot.

In her book Towers of Ivory and Steel, Maya Wind writes that those three institutions were “established to advance the scientific and technological development of Israel as a Jewish state in historic Palestine.” During the period leading to the Nakba – the ethnic cleansing of Palestine between 1947 and 1949 – they were “directly recruited to support the violent dispossession required for Zionist territorial expansion.”

The universities helped sustain the forces which attacked Palestinian towns and villages, as well as developing arms for them. They still perform such a function.

A “science park” operated by the Weizmann Institute, for example, undertakes joint research with some of Israel’s main weapons makers. A subsidiary of Elbit Systems – Israel’s largest arms firm – is even based in that “park.”

The Weizmann Institute, lest it be forgotten, is named after Chaim Weizmann. A leading figure in the Zionist movement (who became Israel’s first president), he lobbied heavily for Britain both to issue the Balfour Declaration and deliver on the commitments contained in it.

The EU’s willingness to shower Israel with subsidies as it carries out a genocide offers tangible proof that something is very wrong in Brussels.

The truth is that the EU has been facilitating Israel’s crimes for a long time. Although that truth is not difficult to establish, there is a sizable number of people within the Brussels bureaucracy prepared to accept the illusion that the EU is committed to peace and justice.

After Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, gave her unconditional backing to Israel as the Gaza genocide got underway in October last, some Brussels officials expressed their displeasure by organizing protests. The protests were subsequently met with threats that those taking part could be punished.

The protests have continued but the message they are sending out is now misleading.

A flier for recent demonstrations stresses “our loyalty to the [EU] institution.” Offering support for “our leaders in their fight to end the war,” it quotes von der Leyen saying “the bloodshed in Gaza must stop now.”

Any calls that von der Leyen has made for an end to the bloodshed do not erase her extremely recent history of greenlighting the bloodshed.

The protests were a direct response to her green light. Rather than demanding that von der Leyen be held accountable, the protesters are pushing her complicity down a memory hole.