Rights and Accountability 19 August 2025
Israeli settler leader Dani Dayan was welcomed to Brussels by Urusla von der Leyen in January 2024. (Dati Bendo / European Union)
Palestine is being shredded to pieces and the European Union is responding with platitudes.
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s overtly fascist finance minister, is reviving the E-1 project that will ramp up the colonization in the area linking East Jerusalem with the remainder of the West Bank. Smotrich makes no secret that his plan is to bury the prospect of a Palestinian state.
He is doing so at a time when various Western countries are moving toward recognizing something known as the state of Palestine.
The suffocation of Palestinian communities which Smotrich is pushing in the West Bank shouldn’t be viewed separately from how he has boasted of extinguishing all hope for people in Gaza.
He and other government ministers have eviscerated the entire corpus of international law which came into effect following the Holocaust. UN conventions outlawing land theft and establishing the necessity of preventing and punishing genocide were introduced during the second half of the 1940s.
Rather than holding Israel accountable, Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, has issued a bland call for Israel to “desist” from taking the E-1 decision forward. The appeal is based on “the need to consider action to protect the viability of the two-state solution.”
If Kallas really believes such claptrap, then she needs to consult a few maps. The simple reality is that Israel’s relentless gobbling of Palestinian land has meant that the two-state solution has long been unviable.
The EU’s devotion to the two-state solution may bear the hallmarks of a fantasy. But the actual policy being pursued is a fallacy.
By repeating the term “two-state solution” like it is a mantra of common sense, Brussels insiders would like to hoodwink the public into thinking they are working for peace against all the odds.
Yet the two-state solution has always been about perpetuating apartheid. It is a supposedly liberal recipe for preserving Israel as a state wedded to Jewish supremacy, while confining Palestinians to a sliver of their historic homeland.
Accommodating
For all their talk about a two-state solution, EU representatives are quite accommodating to the Israeli settler movement.
In January 2024, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, welcomed Dani Dayan, a leading player in the settler movement, to Brussels.
Using freedom of information rules, I have finally obtained the request which Israel’s embassy in Brussels sent to von der Leyen when Dayan’s visit was being arranged.
The request – see below – notes that Dayan had been chair of the Yesha Council. While the Israeli embassy did not spell out what that organization does, a quick internet search by von der Leyen’s staff would suffice to establish that the Yesha Council is an umbrella group for Israel’s main settlements in the West Bank.
In that job, Dayan argued that it was a “very important Israeli interest to develop E-1.”
Dayan’s “philosophy” was summed up in a 2012 piece he wrote for The New York Times. “Our presence in all of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] – not just in the so-called settlement blocs – is an irreversible fact,” he insisted, branding attempts to stop settlement expansion as “futile.”
Given that Dayan advocates the precise opposite of what EU representatives preach, why did Ursula von der Leyen welcome him to Brussels last year?
The answer lies in his current job. Today, Dayan heads Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum in Jerusalem.
Like quite a few German politicians, von der Leyen harps on about the Holocaust, while enabling a present-day holocaust in Gaza.
In October 2023, she visited Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and offered assurances that he could “count on” the EU’s support during the war against Gaza. If she was willing to be backing a genocide so effusively, it is logical that she should have no qualms about embracing Dayan.
Now that he has assumed a respectable position running a Holocaust museum with which the EU routinely cooperates, the Brussels hierarchy is prepared to overlook Dayan’s advocacy of settlement expansion, a stance he has never repudiated.
The red carpet extended to Dayan was not a one-off incident. Staff working for the aforementioned Kaja Kallas have more recently welcomed Elie Pieprz, another Yesha Council veteran, to Brussels.
Meanwhile, France has stated over the past few days that it “strongly condemns” Israel’s destruction of a school in the northern West Bank. The school had been financed by France, working in conjunction with the European Union.
As Gérard Araud, a former French diplomat, pointed out, such destruction is “classic” for the Israeli occupation. The EU’s response to attacks on infrastructure it has funded has never involved concrete action against Israel.
The latest French protest fits a well-established pattern from which EU states and institutions seldom deviate.Looking horrified about the effects of Israel’s violence – violence which the West enables – is mandatory. Punishing Israel is never contemplated.
Comments
I hope this article reach at
Permalink Khalid Ahmed Chaudry replied on
I hope this article reach at every nook and corner of the world, so that not only the governments, but print & electronic media, academics, students & General Public should understand, the real face of the European Union in regards to the Palestine Issue (facing 2nd holocaust, war crimes & inhalation of territory by Israel) .
May the Almighty Allah reward David Cronin for writing this, an noble attempt on behalf of the occupied Palestine and Palestinians (victims of tyranny) for the eternal peace and justice in the Middle East.
Unfortunately United Nation isn't able to come out of her classical impotance, ineffectiveness, crippledness !
I hope President Donald Trump plays his role as a impartial mediator to convince Israel to withdraw up to the 1967 boundaries (only solution for sustainable peace), so that both nations ( Israelis & Palestinians) can live side by side as sovereign states, peace loving neighbours.
European Union too has to come out of fallacy and double standards to become real champion of the Rule of Law and Human Rights!
The Hague, Netherlands
2 state fantasy
Permalink Anonymous replied on
Delusional or just plain old sinister? Maybe a combination?
Germany and the Holocaust
Permalink Martina Lauer replied on
Moral cowardice is a staunchly held attitude in Germany masquerading as learning from history. We learned from the Nazi dictatorship to always trust our government...
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