What The Hell America!

Paul Rogers

The three main countries in this regard are Germany, France, and Britain, with the last of those three states no longer in the European Union (EU), of course. Germany has been traditionally sympathetic to Israel because of the history going back to the Holocaust, France rather less so, and Britain is also pretty supportive of Israel.

That is certainly true for the current Labour government of Keir Starmer, partly because of all the controversy over antisemitism during the period that Jeremy Corbyn was the party leader — although I think most people now accept that much of that was put up in a political push to damage Corbyn’s reputation with the electorate in Britain. Be that as it may, I think you should expect that out of those three key countries, it will be France that is more likely to be independent-minded and less supportive of Israel.

You can see very strong support for the Palestinians in Britain, by no means restricted to the substantial Muslim minority. We have had a series of massive demonstrations in London — approximately twenty demonstrations over the last sixteen months, all of which were peaceful. There have been some attempts at disruption by right-wingers, but by and large the marches have been fairly peaceful.

Those demonstrations have really concerned the British government — both the previous Conservative government and the Labour government in office since July of last year — because this is something that they are finding very difficult to control. What is happening nationally is happening locally as well. I live near an industrial town in the North of England, and there have been frequent demonstrations there too.

There’s a chasm between what the states are saying and what ordinary people are thinking, particularly in Britain. Bit by bit, Israel is coming to be regarded as a pariah state in many parts of Europe, and of course much more so across the Global South. There is a lot of concern in Europe about this at leadership level.

At the same time, however, you have a number of states, notably Hungary and Italy, that have moved pretty far to the right. By and large, support for the Palestinians is much lower in those political quarters. The Israelis obviously recognize these divisions, and they are putting a huge amount of work into maintaining support in Western Europe, but it’s proving difficult for them.

What that means for the EU is that it does not have the unity or strength at the moment to come up with a common view that will hold. That may change, and it certainly could change if Trump comes anywhere near to going ahead with his scheme to clear Gaza. But again, these are very unusual times, and it is difficult to make predictions with the kind of certainty that you would hope for.

The problem for Europeans — and here I can speak mainly about what’s happening on the British scene — is that they’re not really sure how far Trump is going to go on so many of these different schemes. They’re almost taking refuge in the idea that Trump is not going to get away with some of the things that he is doing — there’s quite a lot of wishful thinking going on at the moment.

The problem with the British is they always think they’re much more powerful and significant than they actually are. The “special relationship” between Britain and the United States is incredibly one-sided, and Britain has had great difficulty in coming to terms with that.