Analysis: Several smaller countries are taking a stand about Israel's conduct in Gaza
Away from the warzones of the Middle East, Israel finds itself fighting other battles.
Judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague rejected Israel's request to withdraw arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant.
They are both wanted for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity carried out under their watch in the aftermath of Hamas' October 7, 2023, strike on southern Israel. In a bid to pressure the international court, the United States has placed sanctions on some ICC judges and prosecutors.
Last week, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar went to Brussels for meetings with European counterparts.
He emerged, in his words, victorious, having achieved 'an important diplomatic feat' of persuading the European Union to avoid adopting punitive measures against Israel.
Kaja Kallas, the European Union's top diplomat, said the bloc was keeping 'options on the table' but would not pursue mooted sanctions that it was considering after an earlier EU assessment found Israel possibly in breach of human rights commitments.
But rights advocates were frustrated, given the scale of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza and Israel's documented stifling of aid into the flattened territory.
The EU's acquiescence, suggested Amnesty International's Agnès Callamard, would be 'remembered as one of the most disgraceful moments in the EU's history' and was 'a cruel and unlawful betrayal of the European project and vision'.
The governments of Ireland, Spain, and Slovenia are the three European nations that have been outspoken in their criticism of Israel and spearheaded the attempted reckoning in Brussels.
They are pressing ahead with their own measures to show their disapproval of Israel's conduct of the war, which has severely depleted Hamas but also destroyed Gaza and killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, including many children.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez earlier this month accused Israel of carrying out a 'genocide'.
Irish lawmakers are advancing legislation banning trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, much to the anger of some US officials.
And Slovenia declared two far-right Israeli Cabinet ministers as personae non gratae, banning them from the country.
'This kind of measure is the first of its kind in the EU,' Slovenian Foreign Minister Tanja Fajon said. 'We are breaking new ground.'
There's reason to be cynical about the efficacy of such attempts by small countries.
In Europe, the governments of Britain, France, and Germany remain far more reluctant to confront Israel in similar fashion, while French President Emmanuel Macron's efforts to revive international momentum toward the creation of a Palestinian state seem to be fizzling out.
Israel's boosters in the US can shrug and smirk.
'An unstated reason for Europe's particular animus toward Israel over the decades is that the continent's leaders secretly resent Israel's willingness and ability to regularly defend itself through tough military action,' mused veteran Washington wonk Robert D. Kaplan, 'something Europe's elites never had even to countenance, and arguably couldn't manage.'
Kaplan and his ilk were unlikely to be impressed by a summit that took place last week in Bogotá, where delegations from 30 countries convened to pressure Israel to end its war in Gaza, as well as its occupation of the West Bank.
The session of The Hague Group was co-hosted by South Africa, which is leading a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and the left-wing government of Colombia.
It concluded last Thursday with 12 countries agreeing to implement a set of measures to 'restrain' Israel.
These include a denial of arms to Israel, banning of ships transporting such arms and reviews of public contracts with companies linked to Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories.
A scan of the list of the countries that immediately signed on may suggest Israel's leadership isn't quite shaking in its boots: Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Nicaragua, Oman, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and South Africa.
But the conference's backers argued that it's a first step in a global shift.
'For too long, governments have been too afraid of the consequences of angering the US to risk taking action to uphold international law,' Annelle Sheline, a former State Department official who attended the proceedings in the Colombian capital, told me.
'This is about more than Israel and Palestine, this is about a new multilateralism taking shape to replace the old system.'
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NZ Herald
5 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Analysis: Several smaller countries are taking a stand about Israel's conduct in Gaza
That includes a bombing campaign last week in Syria, which Israel says is aimed at defending minority Druze from sectarian attacks but analysts also believe is part of a deeper strategy to maintain influence over the country's fragile post-dictatorship transition. Away from the warzones of the Middle East, Israel finds itself fighting other battles. Judges at the International Criminal Court in The Hague rejected Israel's request to withdraw arrest warrants for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant. They are both wanted for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity carried out under their watch in the aftermath of Hamas' October 7, 2023, strike on southern Israel. In a bid to pressure the international court, the United States has placed sanctions on some ICC judges and prosecutors. Last week, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar went to Brussels for meetings with European counterparts. He emerged, in his words, victorious, having achieved 'an important diplomatic feat' of persuading the European Union to avoid adopting punitive measures against Israel. Kaja Kallas, the European Union's top diplomat, said the bloc was keeping 'options on the table' but would not pursue mooted sanctions that it was considering after an earlier EU assessment found Israel possibly in breach of human rights commitments. But rights advocates were frustrated, given the scale of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza and Israel's documented stifling of aid into the flattened territory. The EU's acquiescence, suggested Amnesty International's Agnès Callamard, would be 'remembered as one of the most disgraceful moments in the EU's history' and was 'a cruel and unlawful betrayal of the European project and vision'. The governments of Ireland, Spain, and Slovenia are the three European nations that have been outspoken in their criticism of Israel and spearheaded the attempted reckoning in Brussels. They are pressing ahead with their own measures to show their disapproval of Israel's conduct of the war, which has severely depleted Hamas but also destroyed Gaza and killed tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, including many children. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez earlier this month accused Israel of carrying out a 'genocide'. Irish lawmakers are advancing legislation banning trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, much to the anger of some US officials. And Slovenia declared two far-right Israeli Cabinet ministers as personae non gratae, banning them from the country. 'This kind of measure is the first of its kind in the EU,' Slovenian Foreign Minister Tanja Fajon said. 'We are breaking new ground.' There's reason to be cynical about the efficacy of such attempts by small countries. In Europe, the governments of Britain, France, and Germany remain far more reluctant to confront Israel in similar fashion, while French President Emmanuel Macron's efforts to revive international momentum toward the creation of a Palestinian state seem to be fizzling out. Israel's boosters in the US can shrug and smirk. 'An unstated reason for Europe's particular animus toward Israel over the decades is that the continent's leaders secretly resent Israel's willingness and ability to regularly defend itself through tough military action,' mused veteran Washington wonk Robert D. Kaplan, 'something Europe's elites never had even to countenance, and arguably couldn't manage.' Kaplan and his ilk were unlikely to be impressed by a summit that took place last week in Bogotá, where delegations from 30 countries convened to pressure Israel to end its war in Gaza, as well as its occupation of the West Bank. The session of The Hague Group was co-hosted by South Africa, which is leading a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, and the left-wing government of Colombia. It concluded last Thursday with 12 countries agreeing to implement a set of measures to 'restrain' Israel. These include a denial of arms to Israel, banning of ships transporting such arms and reviews of public contracts with companies linked to Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories. A scan of the list of the countries that immediately signed on may suggest Israel's leadership isn't quite shaking in its boots: Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Nicaragua, Oman, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and South Africa. But the conference's backers argued that it's a first step in a global shift. 'For too long, governments have been too afraid of the consequences of angering the US to risk taking action to uphold international law,' Annelle Sheline, a former State Department official who attended the proceedings in the Colombian capital, told me. 'This is about more than Israel and Palestine, this is about a new multilateralism taking shape to replace the old system.'
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5 hours ago
- NZ Herald
James of thrones: A new book on the monarch who created modern Britain
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For the first time, ambassadors were appointed to represent 'the King of Great Britain'. The European powers – Britain, Spain, Portugal, France and the Netherlands – were jostling for position, particularly when it came to trade. It's a brave author who discusses the origins of colonialism, but Whitelock does this brilliantly, plunging us into the mindset of the times, never excusing, only laying out the facts, the context and the history. Part one discusses James's ascension to the throne. When Elizabeth I died, this most stubborn of queens had failed to name her successor and people were nervous. Civil war was a distinct possibility and the English worried that European countries would use the excuse of a contested succession to invade. But James – and here we see the canny Scot – had spent years secretly planning for this, cultivating alliances with both Catholic and Protestant courts in Europe, as well as significant players in England. Of note is his secret correspondence with Elizabeth's closest adviser, Robert Cecil. This was dangerous for Cecil – Elizabeth liked to know everything. We learn that James's code name for Cecil was '10', while Cecil referred to James as '30'. When Elizabeth died, James proceeded to London with great ceremony. 'It was to be a truly unprecedented progress: a king of Scotland travelling south … to peacefully claim the crown of England after centuries of acrimonious rivalry and warfare between the two nations.' Nevertheless, we learn that more than 4000 soldiers were deployed across London and that eight ships were moored on the Thames in case of foreign invasion. The English were mostly happy with James as successor, not least because he already had two male heirs (he'd been married to Anne of Denmark for 13 years). Plus, he was a direct descendent of Henry VII, his grandmother being Henry's eldest daughter. 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Comment: In recent weeks the bewildering Middle East crisis factory – to borrow a term – has reached new heights of tragic complexity. In Gaza, Israel and Hamas claimed to be closing in on a new ceasefire and hostage deal under duress from the US. Simultaneously, the US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation's aid distribution points critical to life (after the departure of all other aid agencies) continue to be death traps for Gazan civilians. And a new Israeli plan to filter the entire Gaza population into a 'humanitarian city' in the southern part of the ravaged Gaza Strip looks hauntingly like a vast concentration camp. Meanwhile, to the north the glimmer of a hope that was the collapse of the brutal Assad regime on December 8 last year – a date etched into Syrian history and many Syrians' rear car windows here in New Zealand – continues to slip into a pattern of ethno-sectarian violence and external intervention. Following sectarian fighting and massacres on the Alawite-majority Syrian coast and Sunni-Druze clashes earlier this year, a new escalation occurred in the past week with violence between members of the Druze religious minority and Sunni bedouin fighters. This triggered interventions in the Druze-majority city of Suwayda by the Israelis from the south and the new authorities in Damascus from the north. Ostensibly both parties claimed to be intervening to protect minorities and to restore order. Nonetheless, as of writing this article, Druze fighters remain engaged in pitched battles with Syrian government security forces and allied tribal militias in and around Suwayda. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to protect the Druze minority, a community which has a long history of pragmatic relations with Israel but also a proud history of Syrian and Arab nationalism going back to the 1925 Arab Revolt against the French. It shouldn't be forgotten that it was Druze who continued to courageously defy the rehabilitation of president Assad in 2023 and were calling for a democratic Syria when other parts of Syria were silent and defeated. This also explains the current divisions among Druze being exploited by both Israel and Damascus who have now entered direct confrontation. Israeli jets have targeted Syrian government units and even the Ministry of Defence buildings in Damascus. This Syria-Israel flare-up comes only days after Syrian interim president Ahmed Sharaa and the Israeli leadership were exchanging messages about a possible normalisation, or at least a non-aggression agreement, based on the deal mediated by Henry Kissinger in 1974. Moreover, Israel's closest ally, the US, had recently removed sanctions on the new Syrian regime, a huge relief to ordinary Syrians. The view was that Syria, the US and Israel had common ground in their mutual enmity towards Iran and its so-called resistance axis. More extraordinary were recent rumours of land swap negotiations between Syria and Israel involving surrendering Syria's claims to much of the Druze-majority Golan Heights in exchange for the Sunni-majority northern Lebanese port city of Tripoli, which many Syrians believe was wrongly separated with the carving out of Greater Lebanon in 1920. At the present juncture it seems sovereignty and notions of an international rules-based order have become virtually meaningless in the fluidity of a moment where brutal realpolitik and rampant identity politics from Gaza to northern Syria are unmaking the whole Levant. Israel's current hardline government dreams of a patchwork of ethno-nationalist statelets based on simplified notions of Jewish, Druze, Kurdish and Alawite identity and a Sunni Arab emirate occupying the rump Syrian territory. According to this view the latter would naturally be connected to the Gulf States and – via the Abraham Accords – Israel. Some scholars have already declared the end to the Sykes-Picot era, the infamous British-French secret agreement to carve up the Levant and Iraq in 1916. So how should we try to understand such bewildering flux? First of all, looking at the Levant through state-centric lenses of geopolitics or simplified one-dimensional notions of identity will be of little help. At this point I strongly suggest revisiting an alternative taxonomy for evaluating the struggle for a new Middle East. The shaping of events today is very much in the hands of 1) established and would-be tyrants, whose sole purpose is short-term maintenance of unaccountable power, and 2) messianics, who have little cognisance of compromise with alternative interests and possibilities beyond perceptions of prophecy. Genuine progressives who are capable of power sharing and compromise are politically repressed at both ends of the Levant. Subsistence masses continue to suffer grievously or are being consumed with hatred as they powerlessly watch the live-streamed suffering of others. If we look at Gaza and Syria we can observe the effects of this turmoil. On Gaza, there may be arguments to say that the Israeli military command's prime objective has quixotically been to separate Hamas and other militias from the general population to achieve their political masters' 'total victory' and recover the hostages held by Hamas. This explains callous calculations of collateral damage in targeting Hamas, and the herding back and forth of civilians. It also explains the latest vain attempt to vet and seal off the non-Hamas population in the so-called Humanitarian City in Rafah to protect them while the IDF deals a final blow to Hamas. However, the objective is different for Israel's self-declared messianics, who number around 12 percent of the electorate according to the last election results in 2022. Representing this constituency are the openly racist cabinet ministers, Itmar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, who hold disproportionate control over the ruling coalition and Netanyahu's political fate via Israel's fully proportional electoral system. For them the reclamation of all of 'greater Israel,' and the genocidal removal of all Palestinians is a divine duty. Thus, we can recognise the lethal effect of the search for unlimited political power by Netanyahu combined with the messianic purpose of his political partners, for whom it should be noted, the reckless and callous exploitation of Palestinian suffering by Hamas for their own goals has been a precious political gift. The shock of the October 7, 2023 massacres and the never-ending hostage trauma, the ongoing war with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis, as well as the groundswell of anti-Zionist/Jewish sentiment around the world, seems to have had a disorienting and numbing effect on progressive Israelis. They are caught between defending their right to a state and an identity on the world stage and confronting those among them who are destroying any chance of securing that state in peaceful coexistence with Palestinians and the many other overlapping communities of the Levant. Turning back to Syria. The collapse of the Assad regime was an opportunity to open a crack in the negative political context that has afflicted the Levant and wider Middle East. However, like Israel, Syria's opportunity to become a model for pluralist coexistence is thwarted by the duality of tyranny and religious messianism. The current president in Damascus, the former Al-Qaeda leader Ahmed Sharaa, has enjoyed a honeymoon period and rode the wave of euphoria that came with the end of the suffocating Assad dynasty – 'forever has fallen' wrote the respected Syria scholar, Lisa Wedeen. However, a combination of Sharaa's own personal desires to consolidate power, combined with the express interests of neighbouring regimes to ensure that their own autocratic systems would not be compared unfavourably by their subjects to a reborn pluralist Syria, has meant that centralised power is being reestablished in Syria from within and without. Absolute rule can be stable, and in seeking self-preservation, especially in its early stages, can be pragmatic. But Sharaa, regardless of his own ideology, (which is unclear) is beholden to the Sunni Muslim jihadists that carried him through the war years and into power. He wasn't even able to disband and repatriate the foreign jihadist fighters who followed him to Damascus from Idlib, such is his dependence on these messianics. For the latter (Syrian and foreign), toleration of, let alone political equality with heterodox minorities like the Druze and Alawites is unthinkable. This explains how, even though genuine efforts are being made to reunify Syria, the messianic structure of Sharaa's power means he is doomed to continuous conflict and fragmentation with Syria's diverse communities. Many of Syria's progressives who courageously stood against the Assad regime to demand a democratic state continue to reside outside Syria in Doha and Türkiye and elsewhere, ignored by the new Islamist authorities in Damascus. For example, I met with the moderate religious figure, Shaikh Maoz Al-Khatib, in Doha in April. Shaikh Moaz was the first leader of the main Syrian revolutionary forces and commands respect and legitimacy across ethno-sectarian and ideological divides in Syria (as related by some of my minority contacts), and yet he is ignored by the new Syrian government and international actors alike. At present tyrants and messianics are tearing gaping divides in the fabric of the intensely diverse Levant from the south to the north. To prevent this outcome, track II (non-governmental) outreach initiatives and the empowerment and connection of progressives in all camps is needed to arrest the current pattern of conflict and division to remake, rather than unmake, the Levant's mosaic-palimpsest of identities.
