Aletho News

No conflict over shared values

By Ramona Wadi | MEMO | September 4, 2025

EU Foreign Policy Chief Kaja Kallas has partly blamed the US for the bloc’s losing political leverage in Gaza. “If America is supporting everything that the Israeli government is doing, then the leverage they have is there; the leverage we have is in another place,” Kallas said at the annual EU Institute for Security Studies (EUISS) conference on Wednesday this week.

Yet Kallas’s focus on the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza is too narrow to put the EU completely at odds with the US. The US and the EU have diverged on the distribution and accessibility of humanitarian aid, but the EU, like the US, is largely silent on Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

When Israel announced its intention to obliterate Gaza, the EU brandished its so-called principles and stood by Israel’s security narrative. It was only after the humanitarian deprivation became impossible to ignore that the EU pretended to shift its stance and focus on humanitarian aid without focusing on ending the genocide. How is the US impeding EU leverage in Gaza if the ultimate aim is Israel’s colonial survival?

It is true, as Kallas stated, that the EU is not united on its stance regarding Gaza. Several EU countries debated whether to apply the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant. Calls for a weapons embargo have not been heeded. The hype building up to the EU discussing whether it should partially suspend Israel’s participation in the Horizon Europe research programme died down the minute no consensus was reached and failed to even state that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. All the report stated was “indications that Israel would be in breach of its human rights obligations under Article 2 of the EU-Israeli Association Agreement.” Since, according to the EU, there are only “indications”, why should Israel be punished? And since this is another rehashed version of US rhetoric regarding Israel, how is the EU impeded by the US from using its leverage? The EU is not even impeding itself – Israel’s survival remains a top priority for the bloc.

The EU made the most of ridiculing the first presidency of Donald Trump, attempting to make inroads by pitting itself against the US on several stances, while still failing to act. The US “deal of the century” was particularly magnified as the two-state diplomacy suffered a setback. With the Biden administration, under whose presidency Israel received the green light for genocide, the EU was in agreement. A change of presidency in the US will no longer be a convincing argument for Kallas to use. In varying degrees of colonialism and imperialism, the EU and the US are aligned.

In the latest EU meeting held in Copenhagen, there was no consensus once again over “initial punitive action” against Israeli start-ups. Almost two years into Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the EU is still trying to figure out which section of Israel’s economy it can symbolically target in its politics of pretence. Several governments are now speaking of taking initiatives on a national level – also belatedly. Both the US and the EU do not want to punish Israel; they are happy to stand by and let Israel complete its colonial project. “Shared values”, after all, are hard to come by.

September 4, 2025 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite | European Union, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism