Prominent EU official Katharina von Schnurbein. (Lukasz Kobus/European Union)

The pro-Israel lobby is benefiting from a European Union fund set up to advance the cause of equality.

A declaration made by the World Jewish Congress (WJC) shows that it received EU grants worth more than $650,000 in 2025 and at least $160,000 so far this year.

The grants were allocated under Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV), a program with the stated aim of promoting the fight against racism and xenophobia.

If an anti-racism program is to be taken seriously, its participants should as a bare minimum have a track record of opposing racism. Far from having such a record, the World Jewish Congress always sides with Israel, a state practicing apartheid, according to all credible human rights organizations.

The consensus among human rights groups that Israel commits apartheid was reached before the current genocidal war on Gaza began.

The WJC has denied that a genocide is occurring.

Almost a third of all people in Gaza known to have been killed by Israel since October 2023 were children.

Nobody can seriously believe that such a high proportion of child deaths is accidental – not when senior figures in the Israeli government such as Bezalel Smotrich, its finance minister, have voiced a desire to see Gaza “totally destroyed.”

Smotrich made his “totally destroyed” wish in May 2025. During the same month, the WJC claimed that accusing Israel of deliberately killing children amounted to “blood libel” against Jews.

The WJC has continued to obfuscate since then.

Ron Lauder, the WJC’s president, struck a belligerent tone when addressing a recent Jerusalem Post conference. He recommended that Israel should use its “excellent intelligence services” – including the notorious spying and assassination agency Mossad – to “hit back twice as hard” when the state faces “lies.”

The “lies” he had in mind are verifiable facts.

Lauder complained about “fake” photographs of starving children in Gaza published by the mainstream press and on social media websites. There was nothing “fake” about those photos or the hunger and pain they illustrated.

Making genocide worse

The European Jewish Congress – a WJC affiliate – is another pro-Israel group financed by the EU.

In 2024, it received a grant worth more than $230,000 under the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values program.

The sum is significant. It suggests that the EU is a key donor to the European Jewish Congress (EJC).

The EJC’s total declared expenditure on lobbying the Brussels institutions was under $350,000 in 2024.

The $230,000 grant was for a project – ostensibly aimed at building the “resilience of Jewish communities against anti-Semitic attacks” – which kicked off in June that year.

Earlier in 2024, the EJC tried to dismiss the voluminous evidence that Israel was committing genocide as an “outrageous and baseless allegation.”

The EJC has a selective approach towards crimes against humanity.

In December 2022, it affirmed a commitment to “ensure a world where genocide never happens again.”

Genocide started happening again less than a year later.

Not content with denying that genocide, the EJC has pushed for its consequences to be even more extreme.

The group has urged that UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, be deprived of funds.

Such calls would be reprehensible at any time. When issued amid a genocide, they are clearly intended to ensure that people who are barely surviving can no longer avail of the food and medicine which UNRWA provides.

Like similar pro-Israel groups, the EJC is a big fan of Katharina von Schnurbein, nominally the European Union’s coordinator for combating anti-Semitism.

This week, von Schnurbein featured prominently at an annual seminar organized jointly by the EU and Israel. The tacit purpose of the gathering was to weaponize anti-Semitism so that Israel can be shielded from accountability.

The EJC contends that speech opposing Zionism is a hate crime.

Zionism is the ideology underpinning the colonization of Palestine – a colonization process that has morphed into the current genocide. Zionism has been invoked to expel Palestinians from their homes in the 1940s, capture more Palestinian land in the 1960s and wage a war of extermination against Palestinians in the 2020s.

If the EJC has its way, telling the truth about Israel and Zionism would become a punishable offense in many countries.

Zionism is inherently racist. Why are its adherents eligible for funds that are supposed to be used for fighting racism?

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 11 June 2026.

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Mark Rutte and “Daddy.” (NATO)

Mark Rutte is one of Europe’s most dangerous men.

The objectives he champions as NATO’s secretary-general are causing immense harm and will continue to do so for decades.

The objective that 5 percent of gross domestic product be allocated to military expenditure is particularly obnoxious.

If fully attained, it would see most NATO countries spending a higher proportion of national income on weapons and armies than they currently spend on education.

Money doesn’t appear by magic. Unless some new method of creative accounting is developed, it looks inevitable that increases in military budgets will mean less financing for essential public services.

Rutte faces no real pushback from within the political establishment over his agenda.

Spain is a partial exception insofar as it has said “no” to the 5 percent target.

The Madrid government doesn’t merit any real praise. Between 2014 and 2025, the proportion of Spain’s national income used for military spending more than doubled.

NATO’s agenda is only sensible if you think that maximizing the profits of the arms industry is laudable.

Rutte has praised Germany for the example it is setting. Germany expects to spend €152 billion (nearly $177 billion) on weapons and the military by 2029 – twice the level of 2021.

The last time arms production assumed such a key role in Germany’s economic activity was when Adolf Hitler held power.

The consequences of German arms production were catastrophic then. Why should anyone assume that the effects will be benign this time around?

One fact suffices to demonstrate that Germany’s weapons industry and the politicians overseeing it cannot be trusted: Germany is the second largest exporter of weapons to Israel and, by definition, a major contributor to the Gaza genocide and other violence against Palestinians.

The expansion of Germany’s weapons industry has been combined with the country’s continued hosting of US military bases.

Donald Trump has been threatening to reduce the number of American troops stationed in Germany – reportedly as retaliation for insufficiently deferential remarks made by Friderich Merz.

If the threat is carried out, then that would be one of the good things done by Trump. American soldiers should not feel welcome anywhere on this planet.

Cold War time warp

Mark Rutte, of course, has no issue with US bullying. He may be famous for calling Trump “Daddy” but there are strong reasons to believe that Rutte would behave in a servile manner toward any occupant of the White House.

“American leadership is absolutely essential if freedom is to be the rule and not the exception,” Rutte said in April. He was speaking at a Washington event organized by the Reagan Institute’s Center for Peace Through Strength.

Although he is a citizen of The Netherlands (a constitutional monarchy), Rutte claimed he was “raised with Ronald Reagan,” who was “my youth-time president.”

Rutte went on to argue that the entire world should be “eternally grateful” to the leadership of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as apparently they made us all safer. The idea that this transatlantic duo wrapped the world in a big comfort blanket will come as news to survivors of the apartheid regime they propped up in South Africa or families who lost loved ones to the death squads Reagan backed in El Salvador and Guatemala.

The Cold War was won by Reagan and Thatcher, according to Rutte. To honor that “victory,” NATO will remain stuck in a Cold War time warp so long as Rutte remains its top administrator.

In a statement that could have been issued by the Pentagon during the 1980s, NATO recently insisted that its members “reject any attempt to deligitimize nuclear deterrence.”

The concept of “nuclear deterrence” is, in effect, patented by the US – the only country to have ever dropped nuclear bombs on civilians.

As America’s allies, Britain and France are permitted to invoke the concept so that they can retain nuclear weapons. Official enemies are not.

Last week, Rutte cited predictions that the number of nuclear warheads in China’s possession could rise from 200 to more than 1,000 between 2020 and 2030. China, Russia and Iran are trying to “disrupt our societies,” Rutte claimed.

Disruptions to “our societies” are deplorable, as far as NATO is concerned. When “Daddy” disrupts or even attacks other people’s societies then Rutte rows in behind him.

Rutte visited Ukraine over the past few days. During his trip, he went to see a shopping mall and a subway station which have been bombarded by Russia.

Atrocities ordered by Vladimir Putin are abhorrent. That Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was provoked by NATO’s encroachment into Eastern Europe is a taboo subject in the mainstream media.

It is politically expedient for Mark Rutte to empathize with Ukrainians. Iranian girls massacred with American weapons do not count.

While NATO has not officially participated in the war against Iran, Rutte has implicitly endorsed it. Describing the war as “the campaign by Israel and the United States in the Middle East to take out the nuclear and the missile capability of Iran,” Rutte has contended “it is crucial that the world becomes safer through this.”

How does massacring Iranian children make the world safer?

I regularly walk by NATO’s headquarters in Brussels. It is huge and intimidating.

From there, Rutte and his staff constantly pump out propaganda, hoping that reporters will lap it up without asking any tough questions.

The propaganda must not go unchallenged. If Ruffe has his way, our governments will soon be spending more on bombs than on schools.

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Jim O’Callaghan (center), Ireland’s justice minister. (Fianna Fáil photo)

The best and the worst aspects of Ireland have been on display lately.

The best aspect was embodied by Catríona Graham, the Irish activist who confronted Itamar Ben-Gvir, an overtly fascist minister in Israel’s ruling coalition. Graham and her fellow participants in the Global Sumud Flotilla brim with bravery and compassion.

The worst aspect of Ireland can be found in comments which followed a truly shocking incident on Dublin’s Henry Street.

Yves Sakila, a Congolese man resident in Ireland, died after he was pinned to the ground by security guards from a major department store. Video evidence indicates that the level of force used by the security guards was enormous.

Some social media warriors had no issue with that use of force. They reacted to Sakila’s death with an outburst of racism.

A few “journalists” working for media outlets subject to oversight from the Press Council of Ireland attempted to make the racism look reasonable.

Gript – one such media outlet – quickly emphasized allegations that Sakila was a shoplifter in order to offer a pretext for the high level of force used by the security guards. Regardless of what Gript might infer, shoplifting is not punishable by asphyxiation under Irish law.

Toxic agenda

While Gript might be on the margins of the Irish media, it is certainly not marginalized.

Jim O’Callaghan, the country’s justice minister, this week nodded sagely as a Gript reporter asked him about accommodation for refugees.

The game being played here was apparent. By pushing O’Callaghan to “justify” the housing of asylum seekers amid a housing crisis, Gript was insinuating that foreigners are being prioritized over those with a paler complexion.

Rather than calling out Gript for pushing a toxic agenda, O’Callaghan in effect sought to reassure the outlet that he does not favor generosity toward refugees. “We can’t be in the business of providing houses to people who are seeking international protection,” he said.

The Irish government doesn’t really consider itself to be “in the business” of providing houses full stop.

O’Callaghan represents Fianna Fáil, one of the two parties that have dominated Irish politics for the past century.

Fianna Fáil is nominally a party of values. They include guaranteeing “equal rights, equal treatment and equal opportunities for all the people of Ireland.”

It is questionable if Fianna Fáil’s leadership ever paid more than lip service to those values. Yet there is a strong case to be made that the values were taken more seriously in the past.

In the 1930s, a Fianna Fáil government oversaw large-scale subsidies for housing.

The results were impressive: By 1940, the proportion of housing stock built by local authorities was considerably higher in Ireland than in England and Wales.

State support for housing remained significant in Ireland until the 1970s. More recently, however, Fianna Fáil and its current coalition partner Fine Gael have been loath to take any action that would upset landlords and property developers.

Jim O’Callaghan is an attorney and widely considered to be one of Ireland’s brightest politicians. According to various pundits, he is a potential taoiseach (prime minister).

Although he poses as a moderate, the truth is that O’Callaghan panders to the far right.

He routinely notifies his followers on social media of deportation flights chartered by his ministry – in other words, paid for by Irish taxpayers.

The matter-of-fact tone he adopts when making such announcements does not make them any less repugnant.

O’Callaghan is implicitly boasting of being cruel to refugees, even when they are schoolchildren. No doubt, he is doing so because he considers it astute.

I am an Irish emigrant, home in Dublin for a few days. Living outside Ireland means that some of my feelings about the country are more romantic than realistic.

Yet I am confident in saying that Jim O’Callaghan does not speak for all Irish people when he boasts of cruelty to advance his career.

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Right-wing Dutch lawmaker Sebastian Kruis. (Alain Rolland/European Union)

Geert Wilders has built a political career on bigotry and buffoonery.

The Party for Freedom – which he leads – continues to produce a steady stream of toxic garbage. One recent proposal it put forward was that Dutch lawmakers should declare “anti-Semitism, hatred and violence” to be an “intrinsic part of Islam.”

Crude stereotyping by fake theologians like Wilders and his followers should be regarded as the very antithesis of the reputation for religious tolerance which the Netherlands developed over several centuries.

The Party for Freedom (known by the acronym PVV) was defeated by liberals in a general election last year. PVV representatives do not seem to have been chastened by that setback.

Sebastian Kruis, a PVV member of the European Parliament, described a discussion on Israel earlier this month as a “debate without facts.” Rather than citing facts, he branded sympathizers with Palestinians as “scum,” while complaining about “Gaza genocide nonsense.”

Voluminous evidence that Israel’s attack on Gaza is genocidal has been gathered or accepted by the world’s largest human rights organizations , quite a few Holocaust scholars and a preliminary verdict from the International Court of Justice.

The dismissal of that evidence by Kruis has apparently endeared him to at least one organization. Two days after he made his “Gaza genocide nonsense” comment, the European Coalition for Israel hailed Kruis as “someone we can truly call a friend.”

Despite being a party that regularly invokes the Holocaust, the PVV has little regard for the global rules system introduced with the intention of preventing such horrors ever occurring again.

Israel’s colonization activities in the occupied West Bank violate the Fourth Geneva Convention – one of the most important international laws drawn up following the Holocaust.

Each time, therefore, Israel establishes a settlement or expands an existing settlement in the West Bank, it is committing a war crime. Each time, Wilders welcomes an Israeli settlement – as he did in late April – he is applauding a war crime.

The war Israel and the US declared on Iran a few months ago was similarly a breach of international law. It involved the crime of aggression – the supreme international crime, according to a 1946 ruling from the Nuremberg tribunal.

Kruis seems to have no qualms about cheering on such crimes.

“I believe that we must support Israel and the US in every possible way,” he posted in March. Kruis was offering his thoughts on President Donald Trump’s threat to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants if the Strait of Hormuz was not reopened swiftly.

“Civilized forces”

For Kruis, supporting Israel in “every possible way” evidently included attending a party to mark the anniversary of the state’s foundation during May. We can be sure that the party’s organizers did not express any remorse for the Nakba, the mass expulsion of Palestinians from Palestine between 1947 and 1949.

When Kruis joined this year’s celebration he gushed that it was “nice to catch up with civilized forces.” On its 78th “birthday” – 14 May – Israel underscored just how “civilized” it is by attacking a medical center in Lebanon.

The European Coalition for Israel is a Christian Zionist group nominally committed to the principle of religious freedom.

Its commitment is superficial. The group has been silent about the manifold ways through which Israel denies religious freedom.

As the European Coalition for Israel embraces lawmakers from the explicitly anti-Islam PVV, it comes as little surprise that the ECI has no issue with the massive destruction inflicted on Gaza’s mosques during the genocidal war.

But as a so-called Christian group, perhaps we could expect that it would oppose restrictions placed on Easter ceremonies by Israeli forces occupying Jerusalem earlier this year. If the restrictions have upset the European Coalition for Israel, then it is keeping very quiet about its feelings.

The silence reveals how Christian Zionism is such a warped ideology that its adherents will back Israel no matter what that state does.

Christian Zionism does not honor the teachings of Jesus Christ. It is completely at variance with the message of love and equality he preached.

The ideology of Christian Zionism was already an affront to Christianity when it emerged in the 19th century. By backing a colonization project under which Palestinians have been uprooted and are now subjected to a war of extermination, Christian Zionists expose themselves as hardcore racists.

Is it any wonder that they are forming an unholy alliance with the far right?

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 21 May 2026.

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EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas. (European Union)

Nobody danced in the street when the European Union announced this week that it would impose sanctions on what the press calls “violent Israeli settlers.”

The most upbeat interpretation of the measures is to see them as a potential step, albeit a tiny one, towards accountability.

If the measures are followed up by meaningful action – and that is a very big “if” – then the EU will finally make Israel pay a price for eviscerating the core tenets of international law. The fury with which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition colleagues reacted to Monday’s decision no doubt reflects a wider fear among Israelis of isolation.

The framing of the EU’s sanctions is nonetheless highly problematic.

Focusing on “violent” settlers gives the false impression that most Israelis living in the occupied West Bank are peaceful and law-abiding. Focusing on just a few settler organizations and individuals – as the EU has done – overlooks how the colonization project is inherently violent.

In an attempt to appear “balanced,” the EU has flanked its sanctions on “violent” settlers with new measures targeting “leading Hamas figures.”

Reality has thereby been distorted. Attacks by Israelis on Palestinians living under occupation and armed resistance by Palestinians seeking to end the occupation are being treated as comparable.

Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, is culpable of conflating the oppressor with the oppressed. She warned on Monday about the “consequences” of extremism – pointing to both Hamas and “violence against Palestinians” by Israeli settlers.

Through its decision, she claimed, the EU had shifted “from deadlock to delivery.”

Her comment was almost certainly directed at Hungary.

Before his recent electoral defeat, Viktor Orbán had blocked the EU from approving the sanctions eventually rubber-stamped this week. Now that Péter Magyar has replaced Orbán as prime minister, Hungary may no longer be an outlier but closer to the EU mainstream.

Time will tell if the mainstream position becomes one of opposing Israel’s state violence – not merely violence by settlers – through deeds, as well as words. Germany and Italy have so far thwarted moves by other EU governments aimed at removing trade privileges from and suspending cooperation with Israel.

Cash cow

Until such cooperation ends, the EU will continue being a cash cow for Israeli “innovators,” most, if not all, of whom have close connections to the army occupying the West Bank and Gaza.

The Tel Aviv-based firm CyberRidge has, for example, recently been awarded an EU scientific research grant worth nearly $3 million.

According to its own website, CyberRidge blends “decades of academic research with frontline intelligence experience” and protects the “world’s most sensitive data from interception, surveillance and quantum-era decryption.” And the firm enjoys backing from “a diverse coalition of investors focused on deep tech, defense and commercial impact” – “defense” being a euphemism for everything to do with weapons and war.

Further details of CyberRidge’s “intelligence experience” can be found by checking how its key players built their careers.

Shira Kaplan recently expressed her delight at joining CyberRidge as “executive adviser” so that she can promote its products in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Though now working from Zurich, Kaplan is a proud graduate of Unit 8200, a division in Israel’s military tasked with spying on Palestinians.

She is not the only CyberRidge representative to have such a background. Yaron Ben-Schlusch, the firm’s vice president for sales, is another Unit 8200 alumnus.

By awarding a grant to CyberRidge, the EU is helping a firm that hires Israel’s trained spies market itself as trustworthy in protecting the “world’s most sensitive data.”

Israel’s Technion, meanwhile, keeps on milking the EU’s research program.

Since March, the Technion has kicked off at least four EU-funded projects, worth a combined total exceeding $9 million.

Nominally a public university, the Technion demonstrated its strong bonds with the weapons industry once again this week when the firm Rafael sponsored an event on its campus. Attendees were promised an “enriching lecture” and an opportunity to “get a glimpse of our fascinating work.”

Rafael’s “fascinating work” includes being the largest contributor to the Iron Dome system.

Iron Dome should really have been called Iron Grip. The tacit purpose of the project is to maintain Israel’s hold on Gaza, while intercepting missiles fired from there.

Brussels officials ought to know very well that the Technion hosts laboratories for weapons makers who profit from massive injustice and even genocide. Their continued embrace of the Technion means that they are paving the way for future crimes against humanity.

Sanctioning a few “violent settlers” won’t offset those crimes.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 13 May 2026.

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Rima Hassan. (The Left in the European Parliament)

Free speech is sacrosanct in the European Union – just not sacrosanct enough to protect Palestinians and their supporters.

The group EU Watch has been in the news lately for the dossier it has compiled on the left-wing lawmaker Rima Hassan. It is bemoaning how the European Parliament – of which Hassan is an elected member – has so far not punished her for comments she has made about Palestinian resistance.

Resolutions approved by the United Nations General Assembly in 1974 and 1982 asserted that victims of colonization have the right to struggle for their liberation. Such vital context is completely absent, however, from an “exclusive” story which Le Figaro – a leading French newspaper – has published based on the EU Watch dossier.

The “exclusive” failed, too, to analyze or properly spell out the agenda pursued by EU Watch.

Although the article in Le Figaro noted that the organization is the “Brussels equivalent” to the Geneva-based UN Watch, it did not explicitly address how both those groups take an aggressively pro-Israel stance.

Samuel Madar, the Parisian heading EU Watch, was described by the newspaper as “very active on social networks in the fight against anti-Semitism, in particular that linked to the importation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into France.”

Madar was probably pleased with that framing. An examination of his work shows that he has been weaponizing anti-Semitism in order to try and muzzle those who speak out against Israel’s subjugation of Palestinians.

When announcing his appointment as the director of EU Watch in March, Madar circulated a video that included some reflections about his experiences with L’Édito de Madar, a blog he had set up around 18 months prior. His idea, he claimed, was “to bring nuance back into a public debate that too often lacks it.”

Madar has continued to serve choice morsels of “nuance” since then.

On 1 April, he argued that “anti-Zionism must finally be recognized for what it is: anti-Semitism.”

His post was neither an April Fool’s prank nor the articulation of an original thought. “Anti-Zionism is merely the new anti-Semitism,” Abba Eban, then Israel’s foreign minister, had claimed more than 50 years earlier.

Accusing opponents of Zionism – Israel’s state ideology – with being motivated by hostility towards Jews based on their religion or ethnicity does not bring nuance back into any debate. Rather, it peddles ignorance.

Spreading myths

Madar has a habit of spreading myths. Zionism, he has contended, is “the exact opposite of colonization; it is historical continuity.”

If he actually believes that, Madar must have a fickle knowledge of history.

Theodor Herzl, a key pioneer of Zionism, did not balk at using the word “colonial.” As well as establishing the Jewish Colonial Trust, Herzl advocated a “process of expropriation” whereby the “penniless population” – as he called Palestinians – would be removed from their homeland.

If Madar really believes that Zionism is the opposite of colonization, then he should reflect on his role as the French “ambassador” for Keren Hayesod – also known as the United Israel Appeal. Masquerading today as a charity, Keren Hayesod was formed as an arm of the World Zionist Organization, a body that has been focused on colonizing Palestine since its inaugural congress in 1897.

Madar either has a weak understanding of more recent events or he is deliberately being dishonest.

In a video post from October last year, he put scare quotes around the word “genocide.” According to Madar, the Gaza genocide “never existed.”

Almost exactly two years before the video was broadcast, Raz Segal, a Holocaust scholar, published an article describing Israel’s assault on Gaza as “a textbook case of genocide.”

A few months later, South Africa provided convincing evidence to the International Court of Justice that Israel’s leadership had displayed genocidal intent. The court accepted South Africa’s case as plausible.

Madar is a lobbyist and a social media influencer, not a respected authority on international law. His insistence that scare quotes be put around the word “genocide” does not erase the incontrovertible evidence that a genocide is taking place.

Squalid irony

There is a squalid irony behind how Madar is obsessed with trying to muzzle Rima Hassan.

Last year, another politician alleged that a media outlet to which Madar contributed was telling lies.

In response, Madar underscored that free speech “remains a principle to be defended” and is the “very essence of democracy.” For some reason, he doesn’t believe that free speech should be granted to Hassan – a Palestinian elected in France.

EU Watch was supposedly established to “scrutinize” whether the “values” of the European Union are applied in practice.

Among its founders was Helga Trüpel, a former German lawmaker. Despite her links to the Israel lobby, she has warned about the dangers posed by foreign interference in EU affairs and has argued that greater transparency is needed.

There is an indication that EU Watch – the group she helped to set up – may not be fully playing by the transparency rules.

The latest details on its finances, which the group has entered into the EU’s register of lobbyists, are from the year 2023. Guidelines for such entries suggest they should be kept up-to-date.

According to that data, EU Watch is entirely reliant for funding on Philigence, a “philanthropic” foundation.

It is reportedly run by the veteran banker David Wollach and is part of the “wealth management” firm he chairs.

Though working from Switzerland, Wollach is a resident of Monaco, according to documents filed with the authorities in Belgium, where EU Watch is registered as a non-profit association.

Wollach did not reply to my query asking if he shared Madar’s views that the Gaza genocide does not exist.

A few decades ago, Hebrew University of Jerusalem gave Wollach an honorary doctorate, praising his involvement with organizations that “assist refugees, disadvantaged children and other at-risk populations in Europe, the former Soviet bloc and Israel.”

The citation could use some tweaking. More recent beneficiaries of Wollach’s generosity include EU Watch – now led by a man who denies the atrocities Israel is committing in Gaza.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 7 May 2026.

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Dubravka Šuica, a key ally of Israel. (Bryan Dozier/European Union)

When I started paying proper attention to European Union affairs during the 1990s, one expression I heard repeatedly was “democratic deficit.” Shorthand for how the Brussels institutions were not accountable to ordinary folk, the phrase apparently became less fashionable as time went on – while the situation it described got worse.

A particularly stark illustration of the democratic deficit could be seen on 15 April this year.

News broke that morning about how a “citizens’ initiative” demanding the suspension of the EU’s association agreement with Israel had garnered one million signatures.

That afternoon, Dubravka Šuica, a leading figure in Brussels, expressed a desire that the EU’s relations with Israel would return to their “full trust and breadth.”

Šuica was saying precisely the opposite of what everyone who had supported the citizens’ initiative was urging. Intentionally or otherwise, she was underscoring that the powerful treat public opinion with contempt.

Holding the portfolio for Mediterranean policy in the European Commission – the EU’s executive – Šuica is a key ally of Israel and its professional advocates. Her 15 April wish was posted on social media after she met Ted Deutch from the American Jewish Committee, one of the pro-Israel groups with which she has been in contact over recent months.

While there has been no formal downgrading of EU-Israel ties, Šuica dropped a hint that the two sides do not trust each other as much as previously.

How much trust has been lost?

The European Commission – the body to which Šuica belongs – has kept doing business with Israel amid the Gaza genocide. It waited until late July 2025 – just a few weeks before a famine was officially confirmed – until proposing a little action.

The action was never taken.

A “ceasefire” announced by Donald Trump, the US president, in October seems good enough for Šuica. With less media attention on Palestine, she can set about rekindling the EU-Israel romance.

Playing by Trump’s rules

Šuica enjoys the backing of Ursula von der Leyen, her boss at the European Commission. In February, Šuica represented von der Leyen at discussions hosted by Trump’s “Board of Peace.”

Turning up for those discussions – without joining the Board – does not constitute legitimizing the initiative, Šuica has claimed. She is nonetheless striving to lend the initiative an unmerited credibility.

In April, she contended that “strong cooperation” between the Board and the Palestinian Authority was “essential.” Someone with reservations about the initiative’s legitimacy would hardly be pushing the PA (financially dependent on the European Union) to cooperate with the Board (which, in reality, means playing by Trump’s rules).

Trump’s Board of Peace is an overtly colonialist enterprise designed to project US and Israeli power over Palestine and the wider region.

A brief examination of Šuica’s politics makes the implicit endorsement she has given to Trump and, by extension, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, entirely unsurprising.

Before being appointed to the European Commission, she was a lawmaker in the European Parliament. In that capacity, she signed a reprehensible motion when the Great March of Return protests were organized in Gaza eight years ago and frequently attacked by Israeli snipers.

The motion acknowledged that peaceful protest is a fundamental right, then urged Israel to observe “proportionality in the use of force when defending its legitimate security interests.”

That wording gave the impression that resorting to violence against demonstrators can sometimes be reasonable.

The truth is that there is nothing reasonable, proportionate or legitimate about Israel’s blockade on and occupation of Gaza. Everything about the blockade and the occupation – and, of course, the subsequent genocide – is fragrantly illegal, though you won’t expect to hear that from Dubravka Šuica.

Accommodating revisionism

For a few decades, Šuica has belonged to the right-wing Croatian Democratic Union (known by the acronym HDZ).

The HDZ was founded by Franjo Tudjman, Croatia’s first president following its independence.

Tudjman died in 1999 without being punished for his war crimes. He issued the orders for Operation Storm – the mass expulsion of Serbs from the Krajina region – four years prior.

His successors in the HDZ hierarchy have included participants in and apologists for that infamous episode of ethnic cleansing.

Despite how Tudjman fought the Nazis during World War II, the HDZ has accommodated exercises in historical revisionism. The revisionism has been favorable towards the Ustaše – Croatian followers of Adolf Hitler.

The Ustaše’s troops sought to exterminate Jews, Serbs and Roma.

Like quite a few other right-wing parties in Europe, the HDZ has an affinity with Israel. The HDZ position is so extreme that it refused even to call for a ceasefire while the Gaza genocide was at full tilt.

Dubravka Šuica’s diligent efforts to restore “trust” between Israel and the EU have encountered a snag. The two sides have been squabbling this week over how Russian ships carrying grain stolen from Ukraine had been allowed to dock at Haifa Port in Israel.

The EU was reportedly so incensed that it threatened sanctions – though the issue may now be resolved.

Stolen grain is a matter that must elicit a robust response in the eyes of Brussels grandees. The constant theft and destruction of Palestine elicits no more than handwringing.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 30 April 2026.

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Kaja Kallas, EU foreign policy chief. (European Union)

Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s foreign policy chief, served a cocktail of dishonesty and farce this week.

“Europe is the biggest supporter of the Palestinian people,” she said on Monday.

The next day, the EU’s governments demonstrated just how big their support is by once again declining to hold Israel accountable for its genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.

One million EU citizens have signed a call to withdraw trade privileges from Israel. Rather than take that basic step, the EU’s governments have imposed more sanctions on Iran, the target of aggression by Israel and the United States.

Diplomats working under Kallas certainly cannot be viewed as the biggest supporters of the Palestinian people.

A document I obtained through a freedom of information request illustrates that more than two years after the Gaza genocide began, the Israel lobby is still writing the script which key Brussels officials follow.

Hélène Le Gal, head of the Middle East division in the EU’s diplomatic service, appears particularly willing to have the script written for her.

The document shows that Le Gal has agreed to be a host of a “strategic dialogue” organized jointly by the diplomatic service and the pro-Israel group called the European Leadership Network (Elnet). Scheduled for 12-13 May, the event will feature “30 high-level policy and opinion makers – 15 from the EU and 15 from Israel,” says the invitation for the event.

Le Gal agreed that the invitation could be issued in her name, just requesting “tiny tweaks,” according to email messages exchanged between Elnet and her colleagues at the diplomatic service.

It is instructive that Le Gal and her entourage sought no more than “tiny tweaks” to the invitation.

The original draft states that the diplomatic service “presents the EU’s positions and interests to the government of Israel, with the overall goal of advancing relations between the EU and Israel.”

While that phrasing doesn’t appear to have encountered any fundamental objections, at least one of Le Gal’s colleagues felt it was too reductive. An edit was proposed so that it would be clear that the service works “across the globe,” including on EU-Israel relations.

Nobody seemed bothered about the stated goal of “advancing relations” with a state carrying out a genocide.

Red line?

The discussions at the May event will be “entirely” off-the-record, the invitation says. As usual, the public must be kept in the dark about matters of demonstrable public interest.

Such matters, according to the agenda for the event, will include the “Board of Peace” set up by US President Donald Trump, Israel’s 2026 elections, and Turkey and Qatar’s “rising influence.” Iran and the “future of Arab-Israeli normalization” will be on the agenda, too.

Another topic to be examined is the financing of “dual use technologies” under Horizon Europe, a major scientific research program.

As the term “dual use” refers to applications with both civilian and military application, we can make an educated guess about the likely content of such discussions. It will almost certainly be argued that the EU should finance the development of Israel’s future weapons.

In all probability, the well-dressed participants will not be crude enough to underscore that Israel covets more weapons so that it can wipe out Palestinian families and destroy their homes.

Any absence of crudity should not be interpreted as squeamishness by Israel’s advocates.

The European Leadership Network has no qualms about teaming up with figures who can be regarded as “controversial” – for want of a better euphemism.

Earlier this year, it arranged for Eyal Hulata to visit NATO headquarters in Brussels, as the document obtained under freedom of information rules shows.

Hulata may not be a household name in Europe. But he is well-known in certain circles: For 23 years, he was part of Mossad, the agency responsible for spying and assassinations.

Because of other commitments, Hélène Le Gal “unfortunately cannot receive” Hulata, an email message from her office stated. There is no suggestion that she expressed any displeasure with Mossad’s activities when her Elnet chums inquired if she could meet Hulata.

Israel’s new death penalty law has been portrayed as some kind of red line for the EU.

Yet the death penalty bill was already being considered by the Knesset – Israel’s parliament – for a few months before finally being formally adopted at the end of March. The EU-Israel “strategic dialogue” scheduled for May was prepared as the law neared approval.

The unavoidable conclusion is that some of the most senior figures in the Brussels bureaucracy have no red lines. They just have red carpets, which they roll out whenever Israel’s advocates ask them to do so.

Update:

Following publication of this article, I finally received a reply to a request for comment from the EU diplomatic service.

An EU spokesperson said that “Elnet originally scheduled the strategic dialogue for 13 May 2026 but Elnet [subsequently] proposed to postpone the event.”

I had asked whether Israel’s death penalty law had prompted EU diplomats to have second thoughts about cooperating with Elnet and similar groups supporting the Israeli state. In reply, the spokesperson said, “As Elnet events present good opportunities for the EU to publicly express the EU’s position regarding the Middle East, this would have been a good occasion to raise our concerns, including on the death penalty law.”

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 23 April 2026.

Buy me a coffee

Weapons made by Elbit Systems have been used to commit a genocide. (rhk111)

A firm owned by the Israeli weapons giant Elbit Systems is benefiting from a European Union fund set up to stimulate the growth of the arms industry.

Elbit’s Belgian subsidiary OIP is part of the consortium behind an artificial intelligence project focused on “threat detection” for satellites.

Known as Bodyguard, the project was launched in December 2024 – more than a year after Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza began. Bodyguard has been allocated approximately $7.5 million from the European Defence Fund (EDF).

The involvement of a firm owned by Israel’s biggest weapons maker in this EU-financed scheme does not appear to have attracted any scrutiny until now. That is despite how Elbit Systems has played a central role in the genocidal war against Gaza.

Some of Elbit’s divisions have freely admitted that they operated on a 24/7 basis during the early stages of the war. Elbit is also known to have embedded staff in Israel’s defense ministry – the ministry overseeing the genocide.

Elbit has supplied weapons used both in the routine massacres of Palestinians, as well as incidents that were regarded as excessive by world leaders. An Elbit drone, for example, carried the missiles with which seven workers from the World Central Kitchen were killed in April 2024.

Formed as part of a push toward greater militarization, the European Defence Fund is supposedly reserved for arms makers owned by European companies. Yet the rules covering the EDF contain loopholes that Israel’s weapons industry has been able to exploit.

Ruse

Despite being completely owned by Elbit, OIP has long masqueraded as a Belgian firm. Its stalls at trade shows tend to be located in the sections designated for businesses representing Belgium rather than Israel.

The ruse has so far been effective.

Last year, Belgium announced a ban on arms transfers to Israel. In recent weeks, the Belgian authorities have seized two shipments of weapons components that were being transported from Britain to Israel.

Belgium is not going far enough. The Belgian government has raised no objections – at least not in public – to how Elbit’s OIP makes weapons on Belgian soil.

Asked for a comment, Thomas Regnier, the defense spokesperson for the EU’s executive, the European Commission, said that “safeguards have been provided by Belgium” concerning OIP’s participation in the Bodyguard project.

According to Regnier, entities based in the European Union but controlled by firms outside it may join EDF projects “under very strict conditions.” Those conditions include a “restriction on the transfer of sensitive information” to countries beyond the EU’s borders.

“The [European] Commission does not fund any military projects that support the conflict in Gaza,” he said.

“Conflict” is, of course, a strange word with which to describe a genocidal situation.

And despite what EU mouthpieces such as Regnier may claim, allowing OIP to take part in projects like Bodyguard confers an unmerited legitimacy on Elbit, its parent company. That is tantamount to providing support for a genocide profiteer.

For its part, OIP tries to play the victim. It has filed at least two lawsuits against activists who have sounded the alarm about its undeniable connections to Israel’s arms industry.

One lawsuit targets seven activists who took part in a March 2024 protest at the firm’s plant in Oudenaarde, a Flemish town.

Last month, an Oudenaarde court deemed OIP’s complaint against five of the seven as well-founded. The activists face a fine – the amount of which still has to be determined – for disrupting OIP’s activities.

A separate case was taken by OIP against the prominent campaigner Anuna De Wever, who had sprayed graffiti at an OIP site in the francophone city of Tournai during December 2023. De Wever received a suspended sentence but was acquitted of a conspiracy charge in October last.

Along with recording ever higher profits, Elbit brags that it is “at the forefront of space technology.”

Like its parent company in Israel, OIP is eyeing opportunities beyond the confines of this planet.

“We’re going to the moon,” OIP gushed in a recent social media post.

The firm expressed delight at how its “landing camera” has now been “officially integrated” on Griffin-1 – a forthcoming mission to the lunar South Pole.

A trip to the moon offers no more than a temporary escape from the voluminous evidence that Elbit is contributing to a genocide here on earth.

Bodyguard is not the first European Defence Fund project that OIP has joined.

The firm has previously taken part in Odin’s Eye – a space project focused on ballistic missile threats. The project was allocated around $9 million by the EU several years ago.

Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) – another maker of weapons used to commit genocide in Gaza – has benefited, too, from the European Defence Fund.

Intracom Defense – IAI’s Greek subsidiary – is participating in a number of EDF projects. Investigate Europe – a team of journalists – reported last year on how at least seven EDF projects involving Intracom Defense had been approved since Israel’s ongoing war against Gaza began in October 2023.

Inveterate warmongers like Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s chief, are very much asserting their authority in Brussels at the moment. Because of its global activities, Israel’s weapons industry finds rich pickings from the agenda being pursued.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 16 April 2026.

Buy me a coffee

I am trying to read as much Irish as possible. (David Cronin)

The ladybird
Has the singular fame
Of being known
The world over
By that very name
Except in Wexford
Where
For reasons most odd
They decided to call it
The cow of God

The Irish language is replete with gems.

One such gem is the term for “ladybird” — bóín Dé. Literally, that means “little cow of God.”

The only place where I have heard a ladybird referred to as a “God’s cow” is Bunclody, a charming town in County Wexford. The quirk inspired me to write a short “poem.”

I am on a brief visit to Dublin at the moment. The last time I was home was two months ago, when my dad died.

Being in my parents’ house again is both comforting and bewildering.

Happy memories intermingle with a profound sense of absence.

My dad regularly began his days by exercising. Each morning now I have to remind myself that he is not at the gym.

The big news story in Dublin concerns protests over fuel prices.

Others have a better knowledge of the situation than I do. Sarah Clancy, a proper poet (unlike me) and political activist, neatly summarized the class dynamics involved in a post earlier this week.

The Irish government is calling the protests “sinister and despicable.” Ministers appear far angrier about the disruptions than about the cause of the rise in fuel prices: the war which Israel and the US are waging against Iran.

I am disgusted by the war, as well as the brutality which Israel is continuing to inflict on the Palestinians and Lebanese. But I confess that I am not following events as closely as I should.

Over the past few years, I have heard various people recommend submerging yourself in icy water. The apparent logic is that the experience distracts from grief.

I have zero intention of taking that course of action. Frankly I’d prefer to be miserable than freezing.

Besides, I have discovered a form of immersion that I find therapeutic.

Don’t ask me to explain why but I find that diving head first into the Irish language cheers me up.

I am trying to read and listen to as much Irish as I can.

Speaking it more would be a major bonus. Unfortunately I have limited opportunities to do so, though I hope that I will find some before too long.

In my mid fifties, I have realized that the Irish language is a source of joy. The best expression I have learned lately is the Irish version of “it’s a small world.”

Is fánach an áit a bhfaighfeá gliomach. Translation: What an odd place to find a lobster.

Exploring Irish can take you to lots of odd places. That’s what I love about it.

Buy me a coffee

The EU’s Andrius Kubilius and Leonardo’s Roberto Cingolani. (Rannjan Joseph Joawn)

The appetite of the weapons industry is insatiable. Their influence over policy makers goes largely unquestioned.

NATO has refrained from celebrating despite how all its members have reached or exceeded a military spending target set in 2014 for the first time. According to that goal, at least 2 percent of gross domestic product is allocated to arms and armies.

The reason why NATO isn’t jubilant is because it is already pushing a higher target. Last year the alliance agreed that 5 percent of GDP should be allocated to military expenditure.

NATO is dominated by the US. Mark Rutte, the Dutch politician heading the alliance’s administration, reinforced the subservience when he called Donald Trump “Daddy” not so long ago.

“Daddy” – otherwise known as the US president – doesn’t always get his way, as can be seen by how European countries are refusing to participate (at least directly) in the war against Iran.

Most of NATO’s 32 governments also belong to the European Union.

Their unwillingness to directly join the Israeli-American assault on Iran is significant. But it is way too early to claim they are no longer being cowed by Washington.

Trump wields the most clout of all those demanding increases in Europe’s military budgets. By raising those budgets – as they are doing – the European Union is bowing to his demands.

Contributing to genocide

Some of the companies benefiting from the splurge in spending have made a noteworthy contribution to the Gaza genocide.

Italy’s Leonardo was among the corporations named and shamed in a 2025 report by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Albanese had observed that Leonardo takes part in the F-35 warplane program, which is led by the US weapons giant Lockheed Martin. F-35 and F-16 jets have given Israel “unprecedented aerial power,” thereby enabling it to “obliterate Gaza,” Albanese stated.

A document obtained through a freedom of information request shows that the same Leonardo is advocating what it calls a “big bang” approach towards financing Europe’s militarization.

“The EU budget for defense investment should be at least €100 billion [more than $115 billion]” over the period 2028 to 2034, a Leonardo paper states. “As industrial representatives, we believe this to be the bare minimum for starting to rebuild our military and industrial capacities; and if we consider our past complacency after the end of the Cold War, more would surely be needed beyond this baseline.”

Leonardo submitted its paper to the EU’s executive, the European Commission, last year.

While the Brussels bureaucracy has finally agreed to release the document (following consultations with Leonardo), part of it has been censored. The European Commission has argued that the redaction was needed to protect “public security” and “commercial interests.”

Heaven forbid that taxpayers could have full details about what weapons makers want to do with our money.

The corporation Leonardo is named after Leonardo da Vinci. And one of its latest projects apparently pays homage to his Renaissance rival Michelangelo.

It is a safe bet that the firm’s staff did not spend hours marveling at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel when devising their plans for the Michelangelo Dome, as the project is called. The real “inspiration” for the project is almost certainly Israel’s Iron Dome.

When the Michelangelo Dome plans were “unveiled” in November, Leonardo garnered favorable coverage from the mainstream press.

One news report gushed that the Michelangelo system is “able to detect, track, intercept and neutralize incoming air threats like rockets, missiles and drones before they can cause harm.” The report added that Michelangelo “will work similarly to Israel’s Iron Dome, which has been operational since 2011.”

Iron Dome is habitually depicted as “defensive” by its supporters. Those supporters fail to spell out what they mean by “defensive” in this context: Iron Dome was developed to “defend” Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land.

Representatives of Leonardo held discussions on Michelangelo with a senior figure in the European Commission’s research and innovation department during December. That department oversees Horizon Europe, a science program worth approximately $108 billion between 2021 and 2027.

Leonardo already benefits from considerable public funding. In 2024, it received EU grants worth more than $36 million, according to details in the “transparency register” for lobbyists active in Brussels.

Because of such funding, Leonardo is participating in a “clean aviation” scheme alongside Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). A state-owned firm, IAI has boasted of playing a “pivotal role” in Israel’s current war against Gaza.

The European Union’s spindoctors have been issuing statements lately about how Israel’s death penalty bill is “deeply concerning.”

The death penalty must be opposed in all circumstances. And it should be emphasized that capital punishment is an overtly racist instrument as far as Israel is concerned.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the “national security” minister, cannot conceal his delight about provisions in the death penalty bill – approved this week by Israel’s parliament, the Knesset – which effectively mean that only Palestinians will be executed.

That said, the nominally deep concern expressed by the EU is quite shallow.

The concern is canceled out by the EU’s more general embrace of Israel, an embrace that has continued amid the Gaza genocide and the attacks on Iran.

It is canceled out, too, by the EU’s support for weapons makers, whose bottom line relies on making and selling tools of death.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 1 April 2026.

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Steffen Seibert, an enabler of Israel’s violence. (German government photo)

No amount of groveling is enough to satisfy Israel.

Steffen Seibert, Germany’s ambassador in Tel Aviv, ought to know.

A few days ago, Seibert declared his sadness at what he called a “violent settler rampage in Palestinian villages.” Soon after making that comment, he was accused by Gideon Saar, Israel’s foreign minister, of an “obsession with Jews living in Judea and Samaria.”

Saar managed to pack quite a lot of deception into his brief outburst.

The term “Judea and Samaria” is itself deceptive as it implies that the Bible lends legitimacy to Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank and all its attendant brutality.

The idea that Seibert harbors an “obsession” about settlers in the West Bank and their thuggery is deceptive, too. The ambassador generally portrays Israel – the state building the settlements in the West Bank – as a victim, rather than a perpetrator of violence.

Saar concluded his rant by saying it is “good to know a new ambassador will soon arrive – one who will strengthen Israel-Germany relations.”

The inference that those relations had weakened during Seibert’s stint in Tel Aviv is similarly deceptive.

Seibert has held his current post since 2022. On his watch, Germany has been the second largest weapons exporter to Israel; the US is at number one.

By definition, then, Germany is the second largest enabler of Israel’s crimes against humanity, including the Gaza genocide. If that is what happens when relations are supposed to be strained, imagine how much worse things could be if Germany and Israel sang in perfect harmony.

Shocked?

Saar does not have a monopoly on deception. The German ambassador was himself being somewhat deceptive when opposing the “violent settler rampage.”

In his own reply to Saar’s outburst, Seibert suggested that Isaac Herzog, Israel’s president, “and other leaders” had the same views as Germany about “settler violence.”

Complaining – ever so mildly – about a “violent settler rampage” misses the point, deliberately or otherwise.

The problem is not – as Seibert would have us believe – simply one of extremists going on the rampage.

The problem is that every Israeli government – whether “liberal” or overtly right-wing in orientation – has been committed to maintaining the West Bank’s occupation since it began in 1967. The occupation is inherently violent and, as the International Court of Justice has ruled, unlawful.

Isaac Herzog may occasionally feign shock when settlers attack Palestinians.

That doesn’t erase how Herzog belonged to a number of Israeli governments that tightened Israel’s grip on the West Bank. By doing so, he was following something of a family tradition: Isaac’s father Chaim Herzog was appointed the first military governor of the West Bank in 1967.

The Israeli military is still occupying the West Bank almost 60 years later. Just last month, Germany signed a cooperation accord with the very same Israeli military.

The crocodile tears which Steffen Seibert sheds about “settler violence” should not distract from the wider picture of how Germany is deepening its alliance with the military that is occupying the West Bank and committing a genocide in Gaza.

Nor should it be overlooked that in between shedding his crocodile tears, Seibert commended Ghasan Alyan, a demonstrably violent coordinator of the occupation’s bureaucratic arm COGAT, for being “always open to listen and discuss.”

The ambassador wished Alyan well now that his time as coordinator has expired.

Seibert failed to note that Alyan is among the Israelis who have called Palestinians “human animals.”

That was one of many instances in which Israelis have spoken or behaved like Nazis. And yet a German representative – supposedly consumed by guilt over his country’s Nazi past – can praise an Israeli military commander with a Nazi mentality for being “open to listen.”

Miracle?

The Israeli government may go ballistic when faced with mild criticisms from diplomats. The fake friction between Germany and Israel does not, however, seem to be having commercial implications.

Volkswagen – a firm which made weapons for the Nazis during World War II – is preparing to embrace Israel’s weapons industry.

According to The Financial Times, Volkswagen is in talks with Rafael – one of Israel’s largest arms companies. The objective of the talks is to repurpose a car factory in Osnabrück, a northwestern German city, so that it can be used for military production.

News of the potential Volkswagen-Rafael tie-up was applauded by Carsten Ovens, who heads the Berlin office of the European Leadership Network (Elnet), a pro-Israel lobby group.

In February, Elnet recommended that Israel and Germany set up a “joint defense tech hub” so that cooperation on weapons research is placed on a more formal footing. Elnet has maintained contact with big players in Israel’s arms industry amid the attacks on Iran.

Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s president, has now declared that the war against Iran violates international law.

Focusing solely on what Steinmeier says in March 2026 risks forgetting what he said in May 2025. At a time when the Gaza genocide was still at full tilt, he rhapsodized about the “miracle” of Germany’s “reconciliation with Israel.”

That abuse of history remains inexcusable.

The state of Israel had not been established when Germany perpetrated the Holocaust. All talk of “reconciliation” is, therefore, fraudulent.

Germany’s strong relationship with Israel is anything but a miracle. It is a hideous arrangement, whereby Germany seeks atonement for trying to exterminate Europe’s Jews by assisting a war of extermination against Palestinians.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 26 March 2026.

Buy me a coffee

Marcus Faber, lobbyist for Israel’s war industry. (Leonhard Lenz/Wikimedia Commons)

Europe remains far too obedient to Donald Trump.

While his NATO allies are so far refusing to take part directly in the war against Iran, the US president has not been totally abandoned.

Ramstein in Germany serves as one of America’s largest military bases. Attacks on Iran are being coordinated from there.

By allowing Ramstein to be used for crimes of aggression – for that is what the assaults on Iran constitute – the Berlin government is underscoring that it is still Washington’s plaything.

Along with hosting US troops, Germany is a vital partner for Israel’s arms industry.

Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons exporter, has taken a number of steps to reinforce that partnership recently.

One step has involved bringing German “journalists” – stenographers may be a more accurate term – on propaganda trips.

The trips have yielded predictably fawning coverage.

Burghard Lindhorst is among the “journalists” who has been escorted to a “secret location in the heart of Israel” where Elbit makes drones. In return for that privilege, he rhapsodized about how those remote-controlled warplanes have “proven their worth” as they went “hunting” Iran’s missile launchers.

Another step to reinforce the partnership with Germany involves expanding Elbit Systems Deutschland, a subsidiary based in the southwestern city of Ulm.

A few weeks ago, Elbit promoted Iron Fist – technology for “armored fighting vehicles” – during an arms fair in Nuremberg.

If the German Army is willing to incorporate Iron Fist into its battle tanks, then the equipment could be manufactured in Germany, Elbit has signaled.

In a report published on the website of Elbit Systems Deutschland, the firm noted that Israel has installed Iron Fist into the D9 bulldozer, as well as the Eitan, an “armored personnel carrier.”

For some reason, Elbit forgot to point out that D9s are best known as the weapons with which Israel demolishes Palestinian homes. Nor did it mention that the Eitan – hyped as the Israeli military’s Lamborghini by the media outlet Ynet – is being tested during the genocide in Gaza.

As German as schnitzel?

It would not be surprising if Elbit Systems Deutschland seeks to conceal or downplay how it is Israeli owned in the future. Indeed, it seems to have already begun doing so.

At least one publication focused on the weapons trade has published a puff piece conveying the impression that Elbit Systems Deutschland is as German as schnitzel. Similarly, when Elbit Systems Deutschland and the technology firm genua announced a joint project to develop “highly-secure radio devices” earlier this month, the words “Israel” or “Israeli” did not feature even once.

Bloomberg – a titan of the business press – was a little more forthcoming, when it recently reported that Germany is negotiating a deal to buy a large consignment of missiles and rocket launchers from Elbit.

The weapons would be assembled “on German soil,” Bloomberg reported. Despite acknowledging that Elbit is Israeli, the story contained no reference whatsoever to the Gaza genocide or any other crime committed with help from the firm’s weapons.

Elbit admittedly engages in some acts of charity.

When the ultra-liberal Free Democrats were rejected by voters in a 2025 election, Elbit rescued one of the party’s politicians.

Marcus Faber had been chair of the defense committee in the Bundestag, Germany’s national assembly. After losing his Bundestag seat last year, he was appointed a vice president of Elbit Systems Deutschland.

His new role tasks Faber with representing the company in both Berlin and Brussels.

Under a code of conduct applying to lobbyists, Faber and Elbit Systems Deutschland should join the European Union’s so-called “transparency register.” A search of that register indicates they have not yet done so.

That said, if Faber is prepared to accept a pay check from Elbit – a profiteer of the Gaza genocide – respecting ethical requirements may not be his top priority.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 19 March 2026.

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Michael Mann, EU envoy to Israel. (European Union)

Hope doesn’t really enter the picture for anyone who pays proper attention to relations between the European Union and Israel.

Waffle about “values” is abundant. The prospect of accountability nearly always looks remote.

Maybe that prospect seemed slightly less distant at one stage during 2025 when proposals for sanctions were placed on the EU’s agenda. The so-called “ceasefire” for Gaza announced by Donald Trump, the US president, in October means the proposals have been mothballed.

At least one diplomat appears to have been smoothing feathers ruffled by the proposals.

Through a freedom of information request, I obtained a briefing document prepared for Michael Mann, the EU’s ambassador in Tel Aviv, about possible sanctions. Though the document has been censored by Mann’s fellow officials, it drops a strong hint that he sought to allay fears about the proposals – which haven’t been formally withdrawn – when he received a delegation from the Israel-European Union Chamber of Commerce and Industry in January this year.

The document says that the embassy headed by Mann is “very keen” on cooperation with Israel’s business lobby “to promote EU economic interests and foster prosperous economic relations.”

Despite how the document has been censored, it is a safe bet that the sentences which have been blacked out do not examine the moral or legal cost of pursuing “prosperous economic relations” with Israel. The EU’s eagerness to increase that trade clearly breaches its obligations under international law to prevent and punish the crime of genocide.

The closest that the briefing paper – or the censored version of it – comes to acknowledging that something is amiss is when it mentions “public criticism directed against the Israeli government and the situation over the past two years.”

“Public criticism” is doubtlessly a euphemism for the fury voiced by ordinary people at Gaza’s obliteration and the wider subjugation of Palestinians. By fostering “prosperous economic relations” with Israel, the EU’s representatives are treating calls for action from citizens with unadulterated contempt.

Candid and dishonest

Mann’s meeting with the Israel-EU Chamber of Commerce followed an opinion piece which Roni Bornstein, the organization’s chair, wrote for the publication Calcalist in November.

In that article, Bornstein argued that the “relations between Israel and the European Union are not a choice, but a shared strategic interest.” He added, “This is the time to go deeper, not to move away.”

Bornstein’s plea resembles – in tone – comments made by Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission’s president earlier this week.

“Europe can no longer be a custodian for the old world order, for a world that has gone and will not return,” von der Leyen told a conference for EU diplomats.

“We will always defend and uphold the rules-based system that we helped to build with our allies, but we can no longer rely on it as the only way to defend our interests or assume its rules will shelter us from the complex threats that we face. So we need to build our own European path and find new ways of cooperating with partners.”

Those words are simultaneously candid and dishonest.

Von der Leyen sounds earnest when she argues that less heed should be given to international law – the “rules-based system” in her parlance. She sounds earnest in the way that a hardened criminal may be earnest when confessing to illegal behavior so that a plea deal can be obtained.

The truth is that the EU has only defended international law when doing so was regarded as politically expedient.

Israel enjoys such a close partnership with the EU that von der Leyen and her colleagues have not only overlooked its violations of international law, they have sometimes endorsed them. It should never be forgotten that von der Leyen herself backed with considerable brio Israel’s genocidal war against Gaza as it got underway in October 2023.

The association agreement underpinning the EU’s partnership with Israel stipulates in plain terms that human rights must be respected.

Even though that stipulation is formally termed an “essential element” of the deal, there is no reference to it in the briefing document prepared for Michael Mann. From the context, it doesn’t look like the censored content of the document concerned that stipulation.

The document depicts the EU as excited by the “potential” offered by greater imports of natural gas from Israel.

It emphasizes, too, that the Brussels hierarchy wants Israel to remain in the scientific research program named Horizon Europe.

“Participation in Horizon Europe enables Israeli companies to access the European market, find international partners, strengthen their R&D [research and development] quality and expand their operations globally,” the paper says.

The paper effectively downplays the importance of a measure put forward by the European Commission in July last year. Under that proposal, Israel would not be allowed to draw down grants from the European Innovation Council’s Accelerator scheme – a subset of Horizon Europe – if the projects concerned had both civilian and military applications.

The briefing document for Michael Mann describes the proposal as a “targeted measure in response to the humanitarian situation in Gaza and does not affect other parts of Horizon Europe.”

Between 2020 and 2024, Israeli firms drew down almost $265 million from Horizon Europe and an additional $232 million from EIC Accelerator.

The “targeted measure” proposed in July has not been implemented and Israel is still being lavished with EU funding.

Tel Aviv University was recently allocated a Horizon Europe grant worth approximately $2.4 million so that it can investigate “supermassive black hole transients.”

Studying such phenomena has become a “flourishing field of research” over the past decade, a blurb for the project suggests.

As Israeli academics ponder “supermassive black hole transients,” Gaza’s education system remains in tatters and schools and universities in the occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem) frequently come under attack or are threatened with demolition.

The destruction inflicted on Palestinians is rightly opposed by the European public.

That opposition isn’t reflected by the stance of Michael Mann and his fellow officials. They are determined to keep on rewarding Israel for all that destruction.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 12 March 2026.

Buy me a coffee

Matthew Karnitschnig, Euractiv boss. (Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung)

Ursula von der Leyen’s response to the war against Iran was a masterclass in deflection.

Israel and the US carried out an unprovoked attack. Yet that detail was nowhere to be found in the first social media post issued by the European Commission’s president on Saturday.

Instead, von der Leyen directed her bile at what she called “Iran’s murderous regime.” She thereby implied that the country was a legitimate target for Israel and the US, both of which are responsible for infinitely more violence in the world than the mullahs and “revolutionary guards” who are routinely treated as bogeymen by the West.

Her call on all parties to “fully respect international law” came at the very end of the post.

The call was rendered meaningless by her failure to specify that by assaulting another state, Israel and the US had violated a core principle of international law. The Nuremberg trials – held following the Holocaust – categorized a war of aggression as the “supreme international crime.”

If media outlets did their job properly, they would have castigated von der Leyen’s diversionary tactics and insisted that rather than making mealy-mouthed declarations, the EU actually stood up for international law.

Euractiv – a big player in the Brussels press scene – had no apparent problem with a blatant act of aggression. An opinion piece by Matthew Karnitschnig, the publication’s editor-in-chief, merely referred to the US-Israeli strike on Iran as “unprecedented.”

Karnitschnig was not using the word “unprecedented” as a euphemism for “illegal.”

In mid-January, he explicitly backed Donald Trump’s saber-rattling. The US president, Karnitschnig told a program broadcast by Germany’s ARD, “may be a moody narcissist – but, when it comes to Iran, he is for once right.”

Now that the “unprecedented” has materialized, Karnitschnig has written disapprovingly on X about the “old guard of European foreign policy” – a dig at veteran politicians who profess an attachment to international law. “In the desert, no traffic regulations apply,” Karnitschnig commented.

Dismissing the Middle East as a “desert” smacks of racism. And Karnitschnig has developed a habit of putting unsavory attitudes on display.

Last week, he amplified the smear campaign against Francesca Albanese, the United Nations’ special rapporteur for the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

The smear campaign relied on a manipulated video from the lobby group UN Watch, in which Albanese was heard to describe Israel as humanity’s “common enemy.”

Although she did use the words “common enemy” in a speech, fact-checkers have established that she did not direct them at Israel per se.

Karnitschnig chose not to engage with defenders of Albanese, who has meticulously documented Israel’s crimes – and how they are enabled by powerful governments and corporations – at immense personal cost. He preferred to label those defenders as “an anti-Semitic mob.”

As it happens, Karnitschnig has been making blanket accusations of anti-Semitism ever since he took up his current job in January 2025.

Late that month, he resorted to crude and bigoted stereotyping by claiming that “hatred of Jews is as much a staple of daily life as baklava” in “Muslim migrant communities.”

Perhaps struggling to think for himself, Karnitschnig has followed Israel’s well-worn approach of alleging that all its critics have an ulterior motive. In recent days, he has contended that Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister and one of the few European leaders who opposed the attack on Iran, belongs to the world’s “knee-jerk anti-Semites.”

Owned by the Belgian firm Mediahuis, Euractiv hired Björn Stritzel, formerly of the German tabloid Bild as its Berlin correspondent, during 2025.

Stritzel has a fluent command of the bullshit peddled by the weapons industry. Last month, he wrote a feature about investments in Europe undertaken by Israel’s Elbit Systems.

The article did not mention that Elbit is profiting from the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza or anything else that may cast the firm in a negative light. The emphasis was placed firmly on Elbit’s “ambitious” plans – which, if realized, would bring Germany an “additional 1,000 jobs within four years.”

Racist mindset

Stritzel is far less enthusiastic about economic activities if they are designed to help Palestinians.

In December, he tried to besmirch the anti-poverty group Oxfam over an irrigation and fruit growing project in Gaza, which received financial support from the European Union. Citing a document of dubious provenance, Stritzel concluded that it “looks like the EU funded a Hamas project to conceal tactically important positions” [with fruit trees].

Stritzel’s reporting has been promoted by NGO Monitor, one of the most toxic outfits in the pro-Israel lobbying network. That is not surprising: According to NGO Monitor, almost every deed aids “terrorists” if Palestinians are the intended beneficiaries.

The intrepid Euractiv team will soon have a new member. It has recruited Bruno Waterfield, who has covered the EU for London newspapers The Times and The Telegraph.

Waterfield has been known to take the side of Euractiv previously.

When the head of Amnesty International’s Brussels office announced that she was canceling a Euractiv subscription because – as noted earlier – it had stereotyped Muslims, Waterfield implicitly criticized the human rights group.

Amnesty’s decision, he suggested, was an example of “cultural anti-Semitism founded in post-October 7 claims that Israel is carrying out genocide.”

As the genocidal assault on Gaza intensified in October 2023, Waterfield insisted that Israel was simply defending itself. He would later recommend the writings of Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor, to help understand why “Israel exists, resists and persists.”

Waterfield will be in good company in his new job.

Most of us are fully aware that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, operates an apartheid system, perpetrates a genocide and is addicted to aggression.

While people around the world despise Israel for those reasons, the Euractiv crew remains determined to feel sorry for it.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 3 March 2026.

Buy me a coffee

Senior EU official Katharina von Schnurbein. (Xavier Lejeune/European Union)

The European Union is accusing me of “disinformation” for reporting accurately about how it works in tandem with Israel to weaponize anti-Semitism.

The accusation was made after I filed a formal complaint about how the Brussels bureaucracy was keeping secret details of who paid for a May 2025 trip to Israel undertaken by Katharina von Schnurbein, the EU’s coordinator for combating anti-Semitism.

The complaint was made to the European Ombudsman, which sent me a report of a meeting it held with several Brussels officials while assessing my complaint.

That report refers to “articles about the coordinator amounting to disinformation, written by the complainant” – i.e. me.

It says that the officials representing the European Commission – the EU’s executive – at the meeting “shared a sample of relevant articles” with the Ombudsman’s “inquiry team.”

The EU is increasingly using “disinformation” claims to try to muzzle or otherwise punish journalists and academics with whom it disagrees.

Victims of such claims include Hüseyin Dogru, a German citizen who is unable to travel or access his bank account because the EU has imposed sanctions on him over material published on Red, a website which he founded.

The content on Red to which the EU took umbrage concerned the Gaza genocide, the Russia-Ukraine conflict and protests against Israel in Germany.

The EU defines “disinformation” as “false or misleading content that is spread with an intention to deceive or secure economic or political gain, and which may cause public harm.”

I have been investigating and writing about the activities of Katharina von Schnurbein for The Electronic Intifada since 2016. In the ensuing decade, the European Commission has not once pointed out a factual inaccuracy in my articles on von Schnurbein or sought a clarification.

The meeting report sent to me by the European Ombudsman is the first document I have seen in which I am accused of “disinformation.”

The report suggests that the European Commission previously referred to articles written by me, while handling the freedom of information request I had made concerning von Schnurbein’s Israel trip.

However, the European Commission’s reply to an appeal I had lodged following the initial rejection of my request did not directly or explicitly make accusations against me.

That reply claims “there is a real and non-hypothetical risk that the processing of the person mentioned in your request’s data and its public disclosure would harm her privacy and subject her to unsolicited external contacts. Indeed, the person, even though she is not a high-level official and does not form part of the senior management of the EU, has already been the subject of journalistic articles attacking, not only her professional capacities, but also her personal character.”

The reply does not specify who wrote the “journalistic articles” in question.

Racist endeavor

Having learned that the allegation apparently concerned my own work, I strongly object to the insinuations made by the European Commission.

The articles I have written about von Schnurbein have not involved ad hominem attacks.

Rather, they have examined how she conflates bigotry against Jews based on their religion or ethnicity with opposition to Israel’s crimes and Zionism, the ideology underpinning those crimes.

That von Schnurbein resorts to such conflation is implicitly confirmed by the meeting report from the European Ombudsman.

Citing arguments made by von Schnurbein’s colleagues at the European Commission, the report says that she “engages in the global fight against anti-Semitism in all its forms as defined by the definition of anti-Semitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.”

The IHRA definition was drafted by pro-Israel lobbyists. At least one of its drafters – Kenneth Stern, a former staff member with the American Jewish Committee – has opposed how it is being invoked to suppress free speech.

That definition is accompanied by 11 “examples [which] may serve as examples” of anti-Semitism. Seven of those “examples” concern Israel.

Among them is the assertion that “the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavor.”

It is a simple fact that Israel is a racist endeavor.

The quasi-constitutional Law of Return allows Jews throughout the world to live in Israel and be granted Israeli citizenship. Palestinians and their direct descendants forced out of historic Palestine by Zionist forces in the 1940s are, by contrast, denied the right to go home solely because they are not Jewish.

Discriminating against people based on religion or ethnicity is the very epitome of a racist endeavor.

After initially declining to release any details of who paid for von Schnurbein’s May 2025 Israel trip, the European Commission is finally being a little more forthcoming.

A note from the Ombudsman says that the European Commission’s representatives have “confirmed that the work trip in question was an official mission, the costs of which were covered by the Commission.”

The European Commission has still not released any of the receipts or other documentation relating to the visit’s expenses. In particular, it has not spelled out whether von Schnurbein enjoyed any meals or refreshments paid for by Israel or its lobbying network.

To “justify” its secrecy, the European Commission says that freedom of information requests are processed if they concern its senior management or a “public figure acting in a public capacity.”

According to the European Commission, von Schnurbein is not part of its senior management. The argument is deceptive.

Von Schnurbein is the most senior civil servant in Brussels handling the anti-Semitism dossier. She works in the European Commission’s core administration, under the political leadership of Ursula von der Leyen, the institution’s president.

Furthermore, von Schnurbein is demonstrably a public figure.

She has been on numerous public platforms, representing the European Commission.

In late January, she was the main speaker during an event at the European Parliament. The event was held in public.

I asked the European Commission to explain why it is now accusing me of “disinformation” when it has never once identified a factual error in my articles about von Schnurbein.

The European Commission did not answer the question. A spokesperson said, “In the European Union, individuals, political, media and other actors have the right to express themselves freely. The Commission upholds the rights to freedom of expression, which is enshrined in the Charter [of Fundamental Rights].”

“As your requests relate to an ongoing Ombudsman inquiry, we are not in a position to provide further comments,” the European Commission spokesperson added.

Ali Abunimah, the executive director of The Electronic Intifada, roundly rejects the European Commission’s claims.

“The Electronic Intifada’s reporting on the European Union, particularly on the pro-Israel activities of Katharina von Schnurbein, is done with the highest attention to accuracy and journalistic best practices,” he said.

“At no time has the European Commission challenged our reporting and when we asked the Commission to point us to any examples that qualified as ‘disinformation,’ its spokesperson was unable to do so.”

He added: “We will be unyielding in defending our truthful journalism and our right to report on matters of public interest despite such smears or any attempts at censorship.”

There is a sordid irony behind how the European Commission is alleging that I have practiced “disinformation.”

Von Schnurbein has herself been responsible for making false and misleading claims.

During the May 2025 Middle East trip, she dismissed the voluminous evidence that Israel had been carrying out massacres in Gaza as “rumors about Jews.” She even sought to smear fellow EU officials by contending that a bake sale they organized for a Red Cross Gaza appeal risked causing “ambient anti-Semitism.”

Her comments during that trip followed earlier slurs on the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

In 2019, von Schnurbein spread the fake and patently malicious allegation that BDS activists targeted the American singer known as Matisyahu solely because he was Jewish.

Matisyahu had actually been denounced by activists because he took part in fundraising for Israel’s military.

Back in 2020, I reported how von Schnurbein’s formal job description does not mention Israel at all.

Despite lacking a mandate to act on Israel’s behalf, she has consistently pursued a pro-Israel agenda.

Her bias has been applauded by the Israeli government. A new feature on von Schnurbein in the Tel Aviv newspaper Haaretz reminds us that Israel’s foreign ministry has called her an “unwavering partner.”

Monitoring how the EU-Israel partnership manifests itself involves putting information into the public domain.

The information is undoubtedly embarrassing for EU officials such as von Schnurbein. But there is a marked difference between information and disinformation.

I refuse to be silenced or intimidated by Katharina von Schnurbein or any other EU representative. If they keep on accommodating Israel’s crimes, then I will continue to chronicle how they do so.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 25 February 2026.

Buy me a coffee

PenLink’s Omri Timianker with EU diplomat Michael Mann. (European Union)

Israel’s spy technology will be displayed at an exhibition organized by the British government next month.

PenLink – one of the listed participants in the London expo named Security and Policing – is, to put it mildly, a firm that should be shunned.

Five years ago, Meta banned Israel’s Cobwebs Technologies – which PenLink has subsequently acquired – from gathering intelligence across the corporation’s platforms.

Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, had found that Cobwebs was using hundreds of social media accounts to surveil activists, civil servants and opposition politicians in Mexico and Hong Kong.

The details provided about PenLink on the website for the Security and Policing exhibition are misleading. They present PenLink as a British company.

PenLink is headquartered in Nebraska and has extremely strong connections to Israel.

Omri Timianker, a founder of Cobwebs, is among several Israelis on PenLink’s senior management team.

Timianker has in the not-too-distant past been promoted as a veteran of the “special forces” within the Israeli military and “Israel’s secret services.”

When speaking at conferences, he has been praised as being a pioneer among “Israel’s secret services” in the use of “tactical SIGINT.”

As signals intelligence (SIGINT) involves the interception of communications, it is really a fancy term for spying. It is highly probable that any innovation which Timianker helped to realize has been tested out on Palestinians living under an illegal occupation.

In January, Timianker hosted a visit to PenLink’s Israel offices by Michael Mann, the European Union’s ambassador in Tel Aviv.

By Timianker’s account, the pair chatted about “how fast reality is shifting and how critical it is to equip people not just with tools but with the ability to think, question and stay aware in a world shaped by algorithms and narratives.”

From a freedom of information request, I learned that Mann had met a PenLink representative during a November event in the city of Herzliya. In follow-up email correspondence, Mann stated that he would be “delighted to arrange a visit” so that he could see PenLink’s offices.

After I sent a query to Mann, the EU’s Tel Aviv embassy described his meeting with Timianker as a “courtesy visit.”

The visit, according to the embassy, “entailed an informal conversation about technology and disinformation.”

The EU, incidentally, is increasingly accusing journalists and academics with whom it disagrees of “disinformation.”

They include the German citizen Hüseyin Dogru, who is subject to EU sanctions that imperil his livelihood for publishing articles critical of Israel and German state violence against Palestine solidarity activists on Red, a media outlet which he set up.

“Ambassador Mann did not discuss concrete business opportunities for the firm in Europe or elsewhere,” the embassy added.

It is nonetheless indisputable that the meeting with Mann took place amid efforts by PenLink to woo Europe’s law enforcement agencies. PenLink, for example, showcased its wares at last year’s Europe Police Congress in Berlin.

Selling to ICE

Cobwebs – the Israeli firm now owned by PenLink – had previously sought to drum up business by illustrating how one of its systems could be used against Black Lives Matter protesters in the US.

Tangles, as the system is called, mines social media posts to find out which events targeted individuals attend and then combines that data with details leaked about those individuals online.

ICE – the notoriously bellicose US Immigration and Customs Enforcement – has spent approximately $5 million on using Tangles, particularly a feature named Webloc.

Long before he was named the EU’s ambassador to Tel Aviv, Michael Mann had developed cordial relations with Israel and its lobbying network.

Prior to taking up his current job, he was one of the leading figures dealing with the Middle East in the Brussels-based administration of the EU’s diplomatic service.

Another senior player in that service is Hélène Le Gal, a former French envoy to Israel and Morocco.

Through a separate freedom of information request, I learned that Le Gal agreed to receive a delegation from the American Jewish Committee (AJC), a prominent pro-Israel group, in November. The delegation had asked for a meeting to talk about “the current situation in the Middle East, as well as Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine and its increasingly aggressive posture toward Europe.”

Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine is undoubtedly a serious issue – as well as being a consequence of the West’s aggressive posture towards Russia (something that EU and NATO representatives would never acknowledge).

Achieving a fair and sustainable resolution of that war is not, however, foremost on the AJC’s agenda.

Rather, it exploits Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to try and distract attention from the genocide which Israel is committing in Gaza.

Lobbyists know very well, too, that the rapid growth in Western military spending prompted by the Russia-Ukraine conflict presents opportunities to boost Israel’s weapons exports.

Israel and its support network thrive on war. As the EU’s leading players are dedicated to building a war economy, it is grimly logical that they are looking to Israel and its advocates for inspiration and assistance.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 19 February 2026.

Buy me a coffee

Vincent Cronin.

My dad Vincent Cronin had so much energy that I suspected he was powered by the sunshine of his native Wexford.

The countless rays he had caught on Rosslare Strand during his childhood seemed to fuel him for decades.

Although he left Wexford in his adolescence, Wexford never left him.

He made lots of excellent friends in the Dublin region yet there were hints that he never fully adapted to life there. And I must confess that I may bear some responsibility in that regard.

Some time after we moved to Balbriggan, Vincent had the bright idea of growing Wexford strawberries in that town.

His idea proved fruitful — pun intended — until I offered my services at one point in the 1980s.

It would turn out to be the shortest job that I ever had. Mistaking Vincent’s strawberry plants for weeds, I set about pulling them up from the roots.

When my dad saw them in a compost heap, I feared that I was about to be disowned.

Fortunately his thunderous outbursts did not last long. Another apparent consequence of spending his formative years in Wexford is that he had a mostly sunny disposition.

It was a sunny disposition that was mixed with a sense of determination.

My dad once told me that there are four ways to approach any task.

The right way, the wrong way, your way and my way.

Vincent Cronin was a man who did things his way.

He didn’t get everything right — not that he was the kind of guy who would admit to mistakes.

But one thing he definitely got right was marrying my mother Mary. I am sure my sisters Louise and Julie would agree.

It is impossible to quantify the love that my parents had for each other and for their four children and seven grandchildren. I have no doubt that love gave them the sustenance needed to survive the most harrowing of times, notably when their youngest child Aindriú was diagnosed with cancer and subsequently died a few years ago.

Soon after Aindriú’s diagnosis in early 2021, a welcome distraction occurred when The Irish Times published a feature about ExWell, the fitness program that my dad followed with great enthusiasm. Because of the Covid pandemic, the fitness sessions were then being held outdoors.

The article suggested that ExWell had developed an intriguing indicator to tell that its morning sessions were warming up. The key signal was the moment Vincent Cronin took off his woolly hat.

“Sure enough,” The Irish Times reporter noted, “at 8.05 am, the hat disappears off the head of the sprightly Cronin.”

Philosophical

My dad’s passion for sport seemed boundless.

He was so obsessed with cycling that our family home almost required an extension to accommodate his vast collection of Lycra shorts.

When he wasn’t on a bike himself, Vincent took delight in driving a green postal van as he accompanied a commissaire during bike races around the beautiful county of Clare.

He was still cycling as recently as last summer.

And even though he wasn’t physically well enough to keep pedaling in the autumn, he continued meeting up for Saturday coffee with fellow veterans of Balbriggan Cycling Club. If he was in hospital, Vincent would join his buddies via a mobile phone application.

Vincent dealt with his illness in a characteristically philosophical way.

Barely a minute after we learned in June that there was a tumor on his lung, my dad shared the following pearl of wisdom: “The longer you’ve been around, the more likely they are to find quare things inside you.”

I want to send out a huge message of thanks to all the nurses and carers who looked after Vincent as his life neared its end. Warm, compassionate people of numerous nationalities who cared for our dad as if he was their own.

Ireland is a big-hearted country. Many of its biggest hearts beat inside people who have adopted Ireland as their home.

While Vincent wasn’t a fluent speaker, he had a strong respect for the Irish language.

Legend has it that Irish was the only perfect language gifted to the world after the Tower of Babel collapsed.

Certain Irish phrases are so perfect that they do not have direct English equivalents.

Obituaries in Irish, for example, often contain the expression “Tá sé (nó sí) imithe ar shlí na fírinne.”

Slí na fírinne literally means “the way of truth.” Yet dictionaries translate the expression as “gone to a better world.”

There are few better places in any world than Wexford Town or Rosslare on a fine day.

Wherever my dad has gone now, I’d like to think that he has brought the spirit of Wexford with him. I especially hope that he will be able to grow strawberries, unthreatened by clueless gardeners.

Hildegard Bentele, a leading Israel supporter. (Laurie Diefembacq/European Union)

The German lawmaker Hildegard Bentele can always be relied on to parrot Israeli propaganda.

After Israel announced a ban on aid groups which refuse to supply it with details of their staff, Bentele demanded answers from the European Union. She wants to know if the EU has cooperated with organizations that are not complying with the diktats.

The Israeli authorities – she notes in a formal query – have stated that “these measures are intended to ensure transparency and prevent the misuse of humanitarian frameworks by individuals with links to designated terrorist organizations.”

Bentele gives the impression that nothing could be more reasonable than subjecting workers – who give Palestinians food, tents or medicine – to vetting by a state carrying out a genocide against Palestinians. The “measures” are depicted as so reasonable that Bentele’s query does not acknowledge that a genocide is occurring or even refer to Israel’s repeated killings of and attacks on aid workers.

While Bentele promotes Israeli measures “intended to ensure transparency,” she seems less than transparent about her own activities.

In December, Bentele traveled to Washington, where she held discussions with AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee, two of the most influential pro-Israel group in the US.

Bentele has registered that such discussions occurred but she does not appear to have published details of who footed the bill for her trip.

As a member of the European Parliament, she is obligated to declare if a “third party” covers expenses for any travel she undertakes. She did not respond to an email seeking details about who paid for her Washington visit.

Bentele chairs the European Parliament’s committee – or “delegation” as it is officially known – for relations with Israel. Such committees are instruments of both diplomacy and scrutiny, according to the European Parliament’s own guidelines.

Bentele gives every indication that she favors obscenity over scrutiny.

Representing the Christian Democrats, she is fully behind the efforts of Friedrich Merz, her party leader and the current chancellor, to present support for Israel as atonement for the Holocaust. Bentele recently expressed a wish that “other European states” would “look more closely into their past and gravitate towards the German approach.”

Germany and the US are the world’s biggest exporters of weapons to Israel. If all European states gravitated more towards the German approach, Israel would have an even greater supply of arms with which to try and exterminate Palestinians – a people who are in no way responsible for the Holocaust.

Regressive

The Dutch lawmaker Bert-Jan Ruissen is a vice-chair of the European Parliament’s “delegation” to Israel.

Ruissen visited Washington soon after Bentele’s trip in December and has been a little more open about his trip.

In a declaration, he has admitted that his accommodation – three nights at the JW Marriott – was paid for by Israel Allies Foundation, as well as his meals. Ruissen has also acknowledged that his “subsistence expenses” were covered.

The Israel Allies Foundation subscribes to Christian Zionism – a perverse ideology, the adherents of which see Palestine’s colonization and all its attendant cruelty as fulfilling biblical prophecy.

The itinerary for Ruissen’s trip included a meeting in the White House and a gala dinner, during which Donald Trump, the US president, accepted – via a video message – a “lifetime achievement” award recognizing his “commitment to Israel.”

It wasn’t the only time last year that Ruissen was a guest of the Israel Allies Foundation. In June, the group flew him to Romania and paid for a two-night stay at the Radisson Bucharest, so that he could participate in a “European policy summit.”

Ruissen avails of hospitality offered by other pro-Israel groups, too.

In November, he stayed in the Polish city of Krakow as a guest of the European Jewish Association.

There, he spoke at a conference session on the “fight against anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.” That phrasing conflates bigotry against Jews with hostility to the ideology which provides a pretext for the Gaza genocide and previous crimes aimed at dispossessing Palestinians.

Ruissen acts as a mouthpiece for the pro-Israel lobbyists with whom he spends a considerable amount of time.

One of his latest initiatives is a call for the EU to cease funding universities that cease cooperating with Israeli counterparts. Shunning Israel, he claims, violates the principle of non-discrimination.

Ruissen is unconvincing as a campaigner against discrimination.

He belongs to the Dutch Reformed Party (known by the acronym SGP). The SGP excluded women from standing as its election candidates until it was forced to overturn that ban by a 2014 court ruling.

Posing as a defender of “Christian culture and traditions,” the SGP is intolerant towards Islam, too. The party’s website emphasizes that it opposes “a blind and unhistorical egalitarianism” between followers of different religions.

It is logical that politicians harboring such narrow-minded views would identify with Israel, a state which abhors the very idea of equality. If they play their cards right, such politicians can travel widely without having to put their hands in their own pockets.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 4 February 2026.

Buy me a coffee

A German government delegation grovels to Donald Trump. (White House photo)

Germany’s pretense that it upholds one or two principles on the international scene looks increasingly false.

Earlier this month, the Berlin government announced that it was sending a “high-level” police team to assist the US-led Office of the Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The announcement omitted a salient fact: the “security coordinator” works closely with the embassy that the US opened in Jerusalem during Donald Trump’s first presidential term.

Like most other European Union countries, Germany registered its opposition in 2017 to the US decision recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

The objections are meaningless today. By teaming up with a “security coordinator” in Jerusalem, Germany is accommodating Trump’s neocolonial machinations.

The plan, it seems, is that Germany will train police operating in Gaza.

Based on the previous experience of US and EU “security” missions for Palestine, we can make an educated guess about how those cops will be expected to behave. Far from advancing the cause of freedom, the police will be required to act in consort with the Israeli occupation.

Significantly, the new announcement follows reports that Germany is stepping up its cooperation with Yamam, a covert unit in Israel’s highly militarized Border Police. Through such cooperation, Germany is ensuring that Palestinians will be placed under even greater surveillance than they are at the moment.

The new announcement was accompanied by a German-Israeli cybersecurity accord – which is almost certainly a topic of conversation at a major technology exhibition taking place this week in Tel Aviv.

The US and Germany, lest it be forgotten, are the world’s two main exporters of weapons to Israel.

Warning signs?

Germany is a valued client, too, of Israel’s arms industry.

An agreement concluded in the past few weeks will expand the Arrow 3 “missile defense” system which Germany has ordered from Israel. Predicted to be worth over $6.5 billion – considerably more than previously estimated – the contract is Israel’s largest ever arms export deal.

The “trade” between Germany and Israel isn’t limited to physical hardware.

Germany has shown considerable enthusiasm in helping Israel to weaponize anti-Semitism. Use of the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is even being treated as a terrorist offense in Germany.

The weaponization has the backing of Ursula von der Leyen, the German politician who is president of the European Commission.

Two years after first requesting it via freedom of information rules, I have finally obtained speaking notes drawn up for a January 2024 discussion held between von der Leyen and Dani Dayan, who heads Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum.

According to the speaking notes, von der Leyen told Dayan that “we are addressing the explosion of anti-Semitic hate speech and conspiracy myths online.”

The speaking notes do not cite examples of the “hate speech” von der Leyen’s aides had in mind. But a report from discussions of the EU’s working group on anti-Semitism held that same week – discussions in which Dayan participated – is a little more detailed.

That report refers to “the explosion of anti-Semitic incidents across the EU, in particular Israel-related anti-Semitism.” Several participants in the discussion, it says, regarded the term “genocide” as “misuse to describe the war in Gaza, which is fought in Israel’s self-defense.”

The dishonest phrasing betrays the agenda behind the EU’s work on anti-Semitism – which is undertaken in tandem with Israel and its lobbying network. Rather than protecting Jews from persecution, its overriding objective is to shield Israel from accountability.

The meeting between von der Leyen and Dani Dayan was held on 24 January 2024. Just two days later, the International Court of Justice delivered an interim ruling which deemed as plausible South Africa’s case that Israel was violating the Genocide Convention.

The speaking notes make no reference to how Dayan had previously led the Yesha Council, an umbrella group for Israel’s largest settlements in the West Bank. An accompanying biographical note on Dayan has been censored by the EU officials handling my freedom of information request.

If these speaking notes provide an accurate flavor of the conversation, then it seems that von der Leyen did not raise any complaints about how Dayan had sought to justify Israel’s settlement activities, even though they constitute war crimes.

As well as heading Yad Vashem, Dayan chaired the club known as the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) last year. That organization has just issued an updated guide called IHRA recommendations for teaching and learning about the Holocaust.

The guide lists various questions which educators should address. One question reads: “What can learning about the Holocaust tell us about the process of genocide, its warning signs, and possibilities for intervention that might strengthen contemporary efforts to prevent genocide?”

As Israel is a leading player in the IHRA, it should come as no surprise that the guide only deals with a hypothetical genocide. Nothing is said about the genocide which Israel is actually carrying out in Gaza.

The warning signs that a genocide was taking place could be seen by anyone who was paying attention.

On 13 October 2023, Jewish Currents published an article by the Holocaust scholar Raz Segal, in which he called Israel’s violence against Gaza “a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.”

That same day, Ursula von der Leyen paid a visit to Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. “Europe stands with Israel,” von der Leyen assured him.

Not only have the warning signs been ignored, Germany and the EU’s most powerful politicians have backed the Gaza genocide. That they have done so while uttering solemn inanities about the Holocaust makes their culpability all the worse.

•First published by The Electronic Intifada, 28 January 2026.

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