\n<\/p>\n
Europe continues to turn away from Israel, frustrated by a state that has doubled down on attacking its neighbours, with no regard for the global economic shock its actions are contributing to.<\/p>\n
Israel has long been warned of its increasing international pariah status, with the genocidal war on Gaza leading to large shifts in Western public opinion, along with its attacks on Lebanon and Iran. That public opinion has become difficult for European governments to ignore, despite their longstanding close ties to Israel.<\/p>\n list of 4 items<\/span>end of list<\/span><\/section>\n Italy\u2019s right-wing government has become the latest European state to join a growing chorus criticising the country, which in recent weeks has included the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Spain. Calls have grown for Israel to halt its attacks on Lebanon and Iran and step back from a conflict that, analysts warn, threatens to tip the world into recession.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, Spain called for the suspension of the European Union\u2019s trade agreement with Israel in light of its \u201cintolerable\u201d actions in Lebanon. France has previously barred Israeli firms from major defence exhibitions. Even Germany, possibly Israel\u2019s staunchest European ally, has expressed concern over what it termed Israel\u2019s \u201cde facto partial annexation of the West Bank\u201d.<\/p>\n On Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu turned on his European critics, claiming to be a defender of their values.<\/p>\n Europe today, he said, has become \u201cafflicted by deep moral weakness\u201d, before using language borrowed from the European far-right to argue that Europe was \u201closing control of its identity, of its values, of its responsibility to defend civilisation against barbarism\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIt has much to learn from us,\u201d Netanyahu \u2013 who has an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Gaza \u2013 said, \u201cespecially the essential lesson of the clear moral distinction between good and evil, which in moments of truth demands that we go to war for the sake of what\u2019s good, for the sake of life\u201d.<\/p>\n The idea that Israel is waging war on behalf of many of the states that now repudiate its actions is nothing new among the Israeli right-wing, Eva Illouz, an Israeli professor of sociology at Paris\u2019s School for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n \u201cThis has been their line for years,\u201d she said, adding that the Israeli right criticises what it sees as the \u201cdark role played by radical Islamism\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIsraelis view themselves as the elite combat unit defending the West,\u201d Illouz said. \u201cI wonder, however, if Israel and the West wage and fight the same war.\u201d<\/p>\n Israel\u2019s image of itself as a state forced by circumstance to undertake the West\u2019s dirty work, rather than as an equal part of the family of liberal and secular democracies it once aspired to join, has been growing for some time.<\/p>\n And, in recent years, the entry of religious and political extremes into the centre of politics, including the appointment of the far-right Itamar Ben-Gvir as National Security Minister and his fellow ultranationalist Bezalel Smotrich to head the Finance Ministry, has confirmed Israel\u2019s trend away from its imagining of itself as a liberal democracy.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the rift\u2019s been coming for some time,\u201d Chatham House senior consulting fellow Yossi Mekelberg said, describing a trend he said accelerated after the far right\u2019s opposition to the 1990s Oslo Accords, which promised a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. \u201cBut did I ever think it would get this bad? No,\u201d Mekelberg said. \u201cI never imagined these endless wars of choice, widespread religiosity, and unrestrained settlement.\u201d<\/p>\n Israel\u2019s founding in 1948, forcibly displacing 750,000 Palestinians in the \u201cNakba\u201d, as well as its continued occupation of Palestinian territory and apartheid treatment of Palestinians, has always sat at odds with the pretence that it is a liberal democracy.<\/p>\n Accusations of land grabs and human rights abuses have run parallel to attempts by Israeli leaders to establish themselves as a liberal outpost on an apparently lawless frontier. Yet for much of this period, Western political and public support remained broadly resilient, sustained by strategic alliances, Holocaust memory, and, critically, shared security interests.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t style yourself a liberal democracy if you\u2019re occupying someone else\u2019s land and committing ethnic cleansing and genocide,\u201d Israeli academic and filmmaker Haim Bresheeth said. \u201cThis isn\u2019t the sort of thing liberal democracies do \u2026 However, if you\u2019re in Israel and you choose to read just the Hebrew media, you can believe you live in a liberal democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n Criticism from the West has yet to make many inroads into Israel\u2019s political consciousness. Earlier this month, responding to growing tensions between his government and Spain, Netanyahu took to social media to say that \u201cIsrael will not remain silent in the face of those who attack us\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cSpain has defamed our heroes, the soldiers of the [Israeli military], the soldiers of the most moral army in the world,\u201d he said of the military force accused of genocide and torture.<\/p>\n Responding to relatively muted concern from Berlin over Israel\u2019s policy towards the occupied West Bank, Finance Minister Smotrich went further still.<\/p>\n \u201cThe days when Germans dictated to Jews where they were permitted or forbidden to live are over and shall not return,\u201d Smotrich wrote on social media. \u201cYou will not force us into ghettos again, certainly not in our own land.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOur return to the Land of Israel \u2013 our biblical and historical homeland \u2013 is the answer to anyone who tried or tries to destroy us, and we do not apologize for it for a single moment,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any chance of self-reflection or internal reckoning,\u201d Mekelberg said of how criticism may land among Israel\u2019s political leadership and their backers. \u201cThere\u2019s a sense that, if they don\u2019t like us, then we must be doing something right.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Europe continues to turn away from Israel, frustrated by a state that has doubled down on attacking its neighbours, with no regard for the global economic shock its actions are contributing to. Israel has long been warned of its increasing international pariah status, with the genocidal war on Gaza leading to large shifts in Western […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19231","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19231","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19231"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19231\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/18437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19231"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19231"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inernews.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19231"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Recommended Stories <\/h2>\n
Defending the West?<\/h2>\n
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