How Europe and its allies enable the erasure of Palestinians

Palestinians are being erased through violence, policy and silence. This analysis examines how Europe and its Asian allies enable Israel’s war machine — and why even the dead are not safe.

By DR ISMAIL LAGARDIEN

The United States and the European Union provide the key logistical, political and military support for Israel’s brutal attempts at the erasure of the Palestinians. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Across Gaza, Palestinians have been rendered expendable. They are people who, even in death, remain unsafe from the European world’s machinery of violence and destruction. These are grave assertions, but they are not without foundation.

With the notable exceptions of Turkey, the Islamic Republic of Iran and Malaysia, much of the Muslim world has done little more than offer ‘thoughts and prayers’ to the Palestinians — the same hollow platitudes routinely expressed by politicians and officials after mass killings in schools in the United States.

A conservative estimate places the Palestinian death toll at around 70 000, though the exact number remains uncertain. Israel shows no sign of stopping. It continues to pursue the long-articulated ambition of expanding ‘Greater Israel’ — from the banks of the Nile, north across Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, and eastwards to Iran, extending even to the Muslim holy city of Madinah, which some Israeli extremists have declared must be ‘purified’.

Along this path, Israel continues to perform what German Chancellor Friedrich Merz described as ‘the dirty work’ of Europe. It draws ideological legitimacy from ‘European values’, as articulated by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission.

Militarily, Israel benefits from a steady pipeline of United States weaponry. Politically, it enjoys the support of countries such as Japan, India, Singapore and Argentina — economically powerful allies of Tel Aviv and Washington. Spiritually, it draws selectively on religious texts to justify its actions. Together, these elements form the Israeli war machinery — one that appears largely unchecked.

To understand the expendability of Palestinians, particularly in the European imagination, one need only recall the remarks made in 1996 by Madeleine Albright, then United States Secretary of State, concerning the deaths of Iraqi children under sanctions. In a televised interview, journalist Lesley Stahl asked whether the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were ‘worth the price’ of attempting to depose President Saddam Hussein.

‘We have heard that half a million children have died [in Iraq, as a result of sanctions]. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?’ Stahl asked.

Albright replied: ‘I think that is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.’

This cold cost-benefit calculus — where the cost is borne by non-European lives and the benefit accrues to Western power — helps explain Europe’s endorsement of Israel’s mass killings in Gaza and its repeated attacks on Lebanon, Iran and Syria in recent months. Israel is permitted to kill, while protest or resistance is criminalised, lest it provoke the wrath of Europe and its closest Asian allies.

Even in death, Palestinians are not safe. A wave of necro-violence has spread. Palestinian graves and burial grounds have been desecrated, cemeteries destroyed and bodies dumped into mass, unmarked graves. Early in the current phase of the war — a war that began in 1948 — bodies were crushed and burial sites violated.

In Deir el-Balah, in central Gaza, Saida Jaber recalled footage showing the destruction of the cemetery at the Jabalia refugee camp. ‘I felt that my heart would stop,’ she said, explaining that her father, grandparents and other relatives were buried there. ‘I felt that their souls trembled … I can’t imagine how anyone dares to dig up graves and violate the sanctity of the dead,’ she told Al Jazeera.

This disregard for the dead has continued. Early in December, CNN reported that the Israeli military was bulldozing bodies and piling them into shallow, unmarked graves. In some cases, human remains have been left to decompose in the open, inaccessible within militarised zones.

Such practices may violate international law, but Israel — with the backing of the United States — routinely rejects the application of international legal standards to its political and military leadership.

Taken together, the message is unmistakable: Palestinians do not matter in the eyes of Israel and its European backers. Palestinians are expendable — even in death. With the assistance of British and French colonial power, Israel helped dismantle the Palestinian state. It is now engaged in erasing what remains of Palestine and Palestinians themselves.

This echoes the warning of the Jewish writer Walter Benjamin, who, writing in the early 1940s about Nazism, observed that its violence sought not only physical annihilation but historical erasure. He cautioned that ‘even the dead will not be safe’ from such machinery of destruction.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy lies in the apparent helplessness of the Muslim world — with some countries even providing logistical launchpads for Israeli violence in Western Asia. In a region where Muslims form the majority, nobody appears safe in the pursuit of ‘Greater Israel’.

Dr Ismail Lagardien is an internationally recognised political economist and writer. His work focuses on global political economy, global finance and historical capitalism. He has designed and taught courses on Islam and the Muslim world in international relations.