Why did Brussels give VIP treatment to an Israeli war criminal?

Israeli war criminal Amos Yadlin (center) enjoys a drink in Brussels. (European Leadership Network)

With rare exceptions, the Brussels press corps has not bothered to examine how the European Union has mollycoddled Israel and its supporters amid the Gaza genocide.

One story that you surely did not see in the mainstream media during 2024 concerns how VIP treatment was given to a war criminal.

In April, the EU’s diplomatic service jointly hosted a “strategic dialogue” in Brussels with the European Leadership Network, a pro-Israel lobby group. The event was chaired by Amos Yadlin, who should have been taken into police detention upon his arrival in Belgium.

A decade earlier, an Istanbul court issued warrants for the arrests of several Israelis, including Yadlin. He was the army’s head of intelligence when it attacked a flotilla attempting to break the Gaza siege in May 2010.

At that time, Yadlin was nearing the end of his formal military career. He had spent part of the preceding decade pondering how Israel could wage war in an “ethical” fashion.

Yadlin did not pass muster as a moral philosopher. Doing so would require him to denounce the acts of aggression in which he had participated.

He was, for example, a warplane pilot during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In his book Pity the Nation, Robert Fisk observed how such pilots were responsible for “killing thousands of civilians, smashing families between the walls, floors and furniture of their homes with such total violence that their corpses often emerged from the rubble flattened into huge shadows.”

“Powerful and painful”

In 2006, Yadlin – by then head of military intelligence – was part of the generals who oversaw another major offensive against Lebanon. He had a similar role in Operation Cast Lead, the first in a series of large-scale attacks on Gaza, during late 2008 and early 2009.

The massive destruction he and others inflicted then was inadequate from his perspective. In a 2018 interview with the Tel Aviv newspaper Maariv, he urged “powerful and painful actions” theoretically aimed at causing the collapse of Hamas.

A 2007 cable published by WikiLeaks indicates that he has said different things about Hamas in private than in public.

Yadlin, according to that cable, told a US envoy that Israel would be “happy” if Hamas took charge of Gaza’s administration. That would allow Israel to deal with Gaza as a “hostile state.”

Later in 2007, Israel did indeed designate Gaza as a “hostile territory.” The designation ushered in collective punishment against the strip’s inhabitants, culminating in the current genocide.

After retiring from the army, Yadlin has not been short of work as a “national security” analyst and consultant.

He has continued advocating measures that bring immense pain and suffering to Palestinians. In March last year, he sought to justify the bombardment of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure by claiming “we already know, by now, that Hamas always places command posts under hospitals, UN posts, schools, camps and so on and so forth.”

It is not surprising that the European Union’s diplomatic service did not promote how it helped arrange last year’s “strategic dialogue” involving Yadlin.

The other hosts of the event, the European Leadership Network (Elnet), had taken umbrage at comments made by Josep Borrell, then the EU’s foreign policy chief, just a few weeks earlier. Elnet had described Borrell’s accusation that Israel had caused starvation as “false, unfounded and libelous.”

The EU diplomats who arranged the event with Elnet were actually working under Borrell’s direction. Rather than defending their boss from the insults against him, the diplomats were teaming up with the organization hurling those insults.

One clue can be found in how Elnet’s summary of the event contains recommendations for future EU-Israel relations. One recommendation reads, “There is scope for Israel to build on the supply of Arrow 3 [missiles] to Germany by helping Europe develop a multi-layered air defense system.”

Since that recommendation was made, Ursula von der Leyen has identified the development of such a system – tacitly modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome – as a priority for her second term as European Commission president.

All of this implies that lobbyists and diplomats have been chatting amicably about how Israel can benefit from the concerted push to make Europe spend more on weapons.

Such chats would be disturbing regardless of the circumstances. That they are taking place while Israel is waging a war of extermination makes them truly sinister.