Israel Loses Europe
Photograph Source: Ser Amantio di Nicolao – CC BY-SA 4.0
Israel is losing on all fronts. And it’s not just multiple Merkava tanks incinerated by Hezbollah or Tel Aviv high-rises pulverized by Iranian missiles. In the days before April 1, Israel lost the governments of Spain, France and Italy. And it ain’t doin’ too well with the U.K., either. In a word, Jerusalem lost Europe, except maybe for that one historically guilt-convulsed holdout – Germany. France forbade Israeli use of its airspace to transfer U.S. weapons for the Iran War; whereupon, tit for tat as it cut off its nose to spite its face, Israel halted defense spending with France.
Meanwhile, back on March 11, Spain permanently withdrew its ambassador to Israel over Spanish opposition to the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, then at the end of March Spain blasted the new Israeli law allowing the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners, while Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez also accused Israel of trying to turn Lebanon into the titanic wreck it produced in Gaza; Spain also continues its large-scale arms embargo, so no technology, military equipment or weapons get sold to Israel, while its ports remain closed to ships carrying weapons to Israel. Lastly, Spain won’t permit U.S.-Israel military efforts aimed at Iran to use Spanish military bases or airspace. So Spain, as far as Israel is concerned, is in the doghouse. Not that Spain could care less.
Then on March 30, far-right Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni announced: “I accuse Israel of crossing the red line. I CONDEMN the massacre of Palestinian civilians and I announce that Italy will support European sanctions against Israel.” By the way, if you think Meloni is a leftist, you need your head examined. If you think she’s a soft, fuzzy humanitarian, you’ve got another thing coming. For her to get upset about Israeli abuse of Palestinians means it’s ten times worse than whatever you could imagine.
So when will those European Union sanctions against Israel come? The whole world waits for the other shoe to drop, but unfortunately that shoe is in Washington, and Berlin on the Potomac will never greenlight sanctions on its proxy attack dog in the Middle East. Still, the sanctions could come because the people of European countries have long condemned Israel for its genocide in Gaza. And when the governments chime in, that’s a change. Spain is less surprising than France or Italy; it has long criticized Israel for its war crimes and overall barbarity. But Meloni? Who saw that coming? And as for Emmanual Macron, he’s usually so busy checking which way the wind blows, that waiting for him to condemn a genocidal state felt like waiting for Godot.
But even Macron finally got fed up. He and Meloni reached the end of their ropes with Israel, and Israel struck back. “Israel’s Defense Ministry has announced retaliatory steps against France after U.S. president Donald Trump openly criticized [France] for refusing to allow access to its airspace for arms shipments being delivered to the Middle East,” RT reported April 1. Trump called the Franch move “very unhelpful” and warned that the U.S. “will remember” it. Israeli defense mucky mucks termed France a nation that Israel does not consider “friendly.” At the rate this is going that list of nations unfriendly to Israel will include the whole world except for the hyper-capitalist terror state headquartered in Washington. What can Jerusalem do to rectify this, assuming it cares to? End the Gaza genocide by letting in food and stopping slaughtering civilians, stop bombing Lebanon, withdraw from the West Bank and leave Iran the hell alone.
Granted, things have been going downhill between France and Israel for some time. Last year, Macron recognized the state of Palestine, and he introduced an arms embargo on Israel in 2024. “Israeli defense firms have also been barred from showcasing products at French arms exhibitions,” RT noted. Nonetheless, Macron’s government extended a few olive branches to Israel lately, which snubbed them all. The Iran War, which Paris wants to distance itself from, only made things pricklier.
Meanwhile, the EU urges decreased travel overall, as Iran energy cuts bite. Clearly European nations are not happy with this war, and Israel sports a big bullseye for their wrath. Indeed, on April 1, AP reported a “huge spike in oil prices…about a 70 percent price hike for gas and 60 percent for oil in Europe. Since the start of the war, the EU’s bill for imported fossil fuels has jumped by 14 billion euros.” On the same day, PBS headlined an article: “Oil and gas prices won’t immediately return to normal even if the Iran War ends, EU warns.” One EU bigwig admonished that “we will not go back to normal in the foreseeable future.”
The same headache afflicts the Trump imbeciles, because gas prices in the U.S. have jumped over $4 per gallon and are set to shoot through the roof, possibly hitting $5 or $6 per gallon in the near future, if Trump’s wildly unpopular and stupendously stupid, unprovoked Iran War doesn’t end. In short, there’s little public tolerance for the nasty effects of attacking Iran, in the U.S. or the EU – where the chance of sanctions on Israel, a key instigator of this idiotic war, has been quite publicly discussed. The EU HAS already imposed sanctions on settlers for their pogroms in the West Bank and is apparently open to sanctioning far-right Israeli ministers – the sickening Bezalel Smotrich and Ben Gvir, whose repulsive policies are in the EU’s crosshairs.
On April 1, the EU Observer’s headline asked, “Will the EU finally sanction Israel after the death penalty bill?” This bill, one of the most nauseating of the modern era, would enable Israel to execute Palestinian children for throwing stones; such a law alone places Israel outside the circle of civilized nations and condemns it of the most egregious barbarism – as if it didn’t already stand convicted of that due to its genocide in Gaza. This is just one more nail in the coffin of Israel’s supposed status as a civilized nation. This law is revolting, and the fact that it “could damage” relations with the EU is pitifully insufficient. It should sever them, unless the EU wants the taint of blood-stained guilt by association with a state’s execution of children.
For those in la la land, namely the Trump white house, well, they couldn’t care less. The fact that el jefe supports a government that just legalized murdering children for stone throwing means less than nothing in their empty skulls. Which, of course, tells you everything you need to know about the Israeli-American Fourth Reich, to wit, that it lives up to its moniker. But the white house is too preoccupied with its moronic Iran War to notice that the abuses embodied in Israeli legalization of crimes against Palestinians just shot into the stratosphere.
How preoccupied? Well, those of us who live in what Fidel Castro once called the heart of the enemy recently got news that we will apparently introduce ground troops into Iran, which sounds like a suicide mission, since the IRGC has been training for precisely this – an American invasion of their Europe-sized country, with its many mountain ranges and 92 million loyal inhabitants – for decades. Will our proxy Israel assist with this doomed endeavor? No. Jerusalem knows a loser when it sees one and besides, has enough problems getting hammered by daily barrages of Iranian and Hezbollah missiles, against which it no longer has any air defense. So Trump rides to the OK corral alone. This after a Black Hawk helicopter had to flee Iran April 3, and news came of shootdowns of multiple U.S. fighter jets, some of them possibly even our top-of-the-line boondoggle nonpareil stealth bombers, while American pilots who ejected, sought by Iranian police, had to scramble to safety. So no, overall, prospects for this invasive enterprise do not look good.
What, you may ask, has the Empire and its proxy, Israel, got us into? A catastrophic war or a catastrophic war with a global economic collapse – you pick. And as the excellent Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy noted in a recent interview with Owen Jones, when things really go south, and Washington loses the Iran War, who do you think will get blamed? Well, Donald Trump will make sure it’s not him. So that leaves Israel – already a pariah state with most of the world’s population for its disgusting treatment of Palestinians generally and its genocide of Gaza in particular; recently shunned by several powerful European governments; a possible target of E.U. sanctions, and believe me, those sanctions will come when Trump decides to save his neck by pointing a finger at Israel. As Levy said – Israel will get blamed. So that’s the end of Israel’s allies – Europe and the U.S.
Because Eurasia and the Global South already want nothing to do with Israel. In fact, according to the very knowledgeable commentator, Andrei Martyanov in an April 2 interview with Sharmine Narwani, Israel’s behavior, like the U.S.’s, was deemed so atrocious that Russia privately warned both nations it would not tolerate a nuclear assault on Iran. Once the war is over, Russia may decide it has to get along with the U.S. But Israel? Not so much. Amirite?
