Ramona Wadi
Speaking at the Emergency Summit of the League of Arab States this week, EuropeanCouncil President Antonio Costa’s intervention was replete with normalised inaccuracies. Besides the usual two-state rhetoric – the EU and the international community continuously display a tenacity towards the moribund “solution” – Costa’s speech seemed to ignore the fact that the EU’s alleged commitment to peace allowed Israel’s genocide to continue unhindered.
If diplomacy is an excuse for failing to prevent genocide, then diplomacy must be declared as defunct as the two-state paradigm.
While most of his speech was dedicated to the EU praising itself and its role in supporting humanitarian aid for Gaza and urging for a continued observation of the ceasefire, Costa made one observation which clearly illustrates how the international community has damagedPalestinians consistently since it first envisaged a Zionist colonial presence in Palestine.
Calling for respecting the UN Charter and international law, Costa asserted, “The EuropeanUnion firmly rejects any attempt at demographic and territorial changes in Gaza, in other parts of the world, anywhere, consistent with the UN Charter, international law, our fundamental principles and relevant UN resolutions.”
Why does history start at the point of the most recent aggression, in the international community’s framework? The EU was not yet founded at the time of the UN Partition Plan in 1947, or earlier when Zionist colonialism started spreading in Palestine through the early settler presence and land appropriation. But can the EU clarify which attempts at demographic and territorial changes it rejects in Gaza? The most recent as a result of Israel’s genocide? Or the entire altering of Gaza’s demography and territory?
This year it was reported that Gaza’s population fell by six per cent – 160,000 — as a result of Israel’s genocide. But Gaza’s demography has been changing at least since the 1948 Nakba, when it hosted tens of thousands of internally forcibly displaced Palestinians escaping theZionist terrorist groups’ ethnic cleansing and massacres.
Gaza as an enclave is in itself an alteration to territory.
Israel’s blockade caused changes to Gaza’s territory. In May 2024, Al Jazeera reported thatIsrael encroached upon 32 per cent of Gaza’s territory to create a buffer zone.
Before the genocide, Israel altered Gaza’s territory several times through bombing, afterwhich the international community would step in with its bureaucratic mechanism of rebuilding. Israel’s genocide has destroyed most of Gaza; is that what the EU is rejecting? Highly unlikely, I think.
What the EU seems to be rejecting is the Trump administration’s plan to ethnically cleanseGaza for prime real estate beachfront land. While forced displacement should indeed be rejected, the EU had ample time to reject the entire colonisation process, call for decolonisation and take a stand against genocide by stopping Israel instead of being complicit.
Are we to understand that demographic and territorial chances from the Nakba to the genocide are acceptable, while the US-Israeli plan is not? Precedents exist for each human right and international violation; US President Donald Trump did not come up with the“Riviera of the Middle East” scenario in a vacuum. During his first presidential term, Trump did all in his power to alter the definition of a Palestinian refugee to the point of elimination. All of Gaza’s people have been rendered refugees. The least that the EU can do is not exploitPalestinians and Gaza over opposition to Trump’s plan.
The EU should be opposing the entire settler-colonial process. It really needs to clarify where it stands on Gaza.
Source: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250306-the-eu-needs-to-clarify-where-it-stands-on-gaza/
