Reading between the lines… and the space between words and deeds
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admin
- June 21, 2026
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The Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) has just measured, with some precision, how far European opinion has turned.Analysing nearly 900 EU statements dealing directly with Israel, its researchers found that negative rhetoric rose from 29% before October 7 to almost 46% afterward – a jump of nearly 60% – while positive statements collapsed from a fifth to under a tenth.Only Iran now draws harsher language from Brussels.The study presents this as a problem of European tone.Read against the record of European behaviour, it is something stranger: proof of a system in which words and deeds point in opposite directions, and a study of how a state can refuse to hear what either is telling it.Begin with the deeds, because they are the part the rhetoric conceals.Through every month of the war, the European Union remained Israel’s largest trading partner.Two-way goods trade reached €43bn in 2025; in 2024, the first full year of the Gaza campaign, that trade actually grew by roughly €1bn, pushed up by increased European exports.EU member states hold some €72bn in direct investment in Israel, nearly double the American figure.When the bloc’s own review concluded in mid-2025 that Israel had breached the human-rights clause that is the “essential element” of the Association Agreement, the finding produced no consequence.A suspension proposal, already narrowed to a fraction of Israeli exports, came before the Foreign Affairs Council in April 2026 and failed – Germany, Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Austria declining to back it.Europe assembled the legal case against itself for inaction, then declined to act on it.The arms record follows the same grammar.Germany, source of roughly a third of Israel’s imported weaponry, approved more than €485mn in military exports in the first 19 months of the war; its later “freeze” covered only the 2% of trade formally classed as weapons of war, which analysts in Berlin called largely symbolic.Italy’s embargo honoured every contract signed before October 2023.British munitions reached Israel at near-record monthly volumes even after London suspended a tenth of its export licences.The pattern is uniform: ban the trivial category, keep the load-bearing one, and announce the ban.The diplomacy of recognition belongs to the same theatre.At the 2025 General Assembly, France, Britain, Canada, Australia, Belgium and others recognised a Palestinian state, lifting global recognition past 150 members and crossing the G7 line for the first time.Recognition is the cheapest instrument in the box – declaratory, costless, binding on no budget and no contract.France made the point explicit, confirming it would not arrest an International Criminal Court (ICC)-indicted Israeli prime minister on its soil.The individual gesture is loud; the collective machinery that controls trade and money, requiring consensus, stays silent.Europe is rhetorically unified around a two-state endgame it will spend no leverage to reach.So the contrast is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. It is a division of labour: condemnation absorbs the moral pressure that would otherwise force a change in conduct, leaving the conduct – the trade, the investment, the weapons – intact.And Israel has read this arrangement correctly.It has understood that European words are free, and behaved accordingly.This is where the JPPI study becomes inadvertently revealing, and where the deeper charge lies.By scoring European “tone”, the study treats the souring as a fact about Europe – a fever to be measured – rather than as a signal generated by Israeli conduct.The instrument points outward. It contains no variable for the possibility that rising criticism is information about the war rather than information about the critics.This is the posture in miniature: external condemnation is read as others’ bias, never as feedback.Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls recognition of Palestine “a prize for Hamas”; his office calls a German arms pause “rewarding terrorism”; Israel attributes Gaza’s hunger to the UN and to Hamas.Every external judgement is metabolised as an attack to be repelled, never as a mirror to be consulted.There is a word for this, and a New Yorker would supply it: chutzpah.Leo Rosten’s classic illustration is the man who murders his parents and then throws himself on the court’s mercy as an orphan.The operative move is not mere nerve; it is the severing of the act from its consequence – the demand to be judged only by one’s grievance and never by one’s deeds.It is the reflex that experiences accountability itself as a hostile act.Here the comparison to Syria’s Bashar al-Assad earns its place – not on regime type, weapon of choice, or the contested question of genocidal intent, where the analogy collapses and should be abandoned.Israel is a democracy with courts, elections, and a protest movement; al-Assad ran a hereditary terror-state that gassed its own citizens.The analogy holds on one axis only, and it is the axis that matters here: the treatment of a catastrophe as a purely internal affair whose costs are then exported to everyone else.Al-Assad’s war was, in Europe’s lived memory, the textbook case – an “internal matter” that arrived on the continent as 1mn refugees in a single year, reshaping its politics, hardening its borders, and lifting the fortunes of its far-right.The lesson European chancelleries learned was that no neighbour’s catastrophe stays internal; the displacement is always externalised, and the bill is always passed along.That is the unspoken thread beneath Europe’s hardened tone.When Israeli ministers speak of the “voluntary emigration” of Gaza’s population, and an American president of “cleaning out” the Strip, European interior ministries hear the opening bars of a familiar score.Egypt and Jordan have refused with rare unanimity precisely because displacement propagates – it does not respect the first ring of host states.The refugee fear is the one cost Israeli policy can impose on Europe against Europe’s will, and the one variable that could eventually break the equilibrium between European words and European deeds.However, that reckoning, if it comes, will be Europe’s to make.Israel’s distinctive contribution is the prior refusal: to read the souring of the world as nothing but the world’s malice, to treat the immensity of its own response as a fact about its enemies, to keep the act and its consequence in separate sealed rooms.The chutzpah is not that Israel acts.It is that, having acted, it presents the bill to everyone else and pleads its own innocence – as the orphan it has made.l Jamil K Mroue is Lebanese writer and previous editor of Al Hayat newspaper in London and The Daily Star in Beirut
