What’s Europe To Do?

When Europe’s leading diplomats concede that the U.S. Secretary of State represents the best hope for their own foreign policy efforts, it is a telling indication of the dire state of things in the Middle East. Even in the post-Sept. 11 era of togetherness, European officials have seldom shrunk from assertions of their independence, engaging in transatlantic squabbles with the Bush Administration over everything from steel tariffs to the “axis of evil” rhetoric of a President whose policies many of them dislike.

Until recently, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was no exception. European voices were among the loudest chastising the U.S. for its lack of engagement in the region, while European envoys tried gamely but ineffectually to fill the void with mediation efforts of their own. Their failure — earlier this month Ariel Sharon refused to let Spanish Foreign Minister Josep Piqué and E.U. foreign policy chief Javier Solana even meet with Yasser Arafat — made humiliatingly evident the need for American leadership. And though the alignment of their interests was born of necessity, European diplomats — under no illusions about his peace mission’s chances for success — were fervent in their support of Colin Powell, whom many perceive as the lone voice of moderation in a hawk-filled Administration.

Powell’s empty-handed return to Washington last week put new pressure on the already frayed transatlantic partnership. Many analysts now expect Europe to break more openly with Israel and the U.S., and cracks have already marred the façade of U.S.-European diplomatic unity. Last week European governments were among those calling for an investigation of the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp that Palestinians say caused hundreds of deaths. In Britain, where most media coverage stopped just short of calling Jenin a war crime and M.P. Ann Clwyd’s tale to Parliament of her delegation’s experience there was told in a voice still scratchy with “dust from Israeli tanks,” Foreign Secretary Jack Straw phoned Powell to press the point. As international clamor grew, the U.S. and Israel agreed to a U.N. fact-finding mission.

Earlier this month the European Parliament echoed the U.S. and the U.N. in calling for an immediate pullback of Israeli troops from the West Bank. But the Parliament went further in demanding the suspension of the E.U.-Israel Association Agreement, which provides favored treatment for trade between the two entities. The non-binding vote was meant to compel E.U. foreign ministers to convene an emergency meeting with Israel. But wary of complicating an already impossible equation, they ignored this contentious recommendation. “Nobody wanted to proceed as long as there was a ghost of a chance that Powell could succeed,” says John Palmer, director of the European Policy Centre, a Brussels think tank. While that ghost lived, even those who have been most critical of the Bush Administration put aside their reservations. “We are in agreement that the top priority right now is helping Colin Powell to success in his difficult mission and strengthening his position,” French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine told Le Monde early last week.

George Bush’s best friend in Europe was also relieved that Powell was finally involved in the Middle East. British Prime Minister Tony Blair had quietly been urging Bush to undertake a more active role in mediating the conflict. Blair is the only European leader who has expressed qualified support for possible U.S. military action against Iraq, but he has also stated that there can be no action against Iraq without a serious Israeli-Palestinian peace process under way. Says a senior British official: “The charge Blair gets all the time in the Middle East is one of double standards, that the U.S. wants to make war on Iraq because of breaching U.N. Security Council resolutions, while Israel consistently gets away with the same thing.”

Those charges have occasionally come from within Blair’s own party. During the same House of Commons debate that featured Clwyd’s harrowing account, Labour backbencher Gerald Kaufman denounced the policies of what he called Prime Minister Sharon’s “repulsive government.” Said Kaufman, who is Jewish: “We need to ask how we would feel if we had been occupied for 35 years by a foreign power that denied us the most elementary human rights.” The murmurs of assent that greeted these words would likely have been jeers had they been uttered in the U.S. Capitol, where pro-Israeli sentiment runs high. And therein lies the root of Europe’s differences with the U.S. over the Middle East.

Support for Israel plays a far bigger role in U.S. public and political opinion than in Europe, from which the Holocaust and an exodus to the new Jewish state drained most of the Jews who might have given it impetus. U.S. Jews are politically well-organized, important sources of funds and talent and disproportionately influential in big, vote-rich states like New York and California. The right wing of the Republican party, through its evangelical Christian connections, has a powerful attachment to Israel as the Jews’ God-given home. In foreign policy, a cohesive group of neoconservatives like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, with strong feelings for Israel as a strategically in a troubled region, have the intellectual initiative inside the Administration. By contrast, the injustices suffered by the Palestinians — predominantly Muslim, poorly organized in the U.S., with their most radical factions supported by unsavory regimes like Iran, Iraq and Syria — have little resonance in mainstream American opinion.

Even France, with the largest populations of both Jews and Muslims in Western Europe, has no equivalent to the U.S.’s pro-Israeli lobby. Only lately, with anti-Semitic acts on the increase — police reported 400 incidents in a recent fortnight, compared to 200 for all of 2001 — and tension between France’s 700,000 Jews and 5 million Muslims on the rise since the start of the Aqsa intifadeh, has the community become more politically engaged. A recent demonstration in support of Israel and against anti-Semitism highlighted uglier aspects of this new dynamic. Some 150 youths rioted, attacking peace activists, journalists and Arab-looking bystanders and stabbing a policeman. “The climate has shifted since Sept. 11, with radical anti-Arab feeling spreading throughout part of the Jewish community,” Jean-Yves Camus of the European Center for Research and Action on Racism and Anti-Semitism told the daily Libération.

Some European Jews may be becoming more politicized, but Harry Kney-Tal, Israel’s ambassador to the E.U., says Europe’s relations with Israel have deteriorated as a result not of valid criticisms of Israeli policy, but of a bias deeply rooted in anti-Semitism, demographics and a kind of proxy resentment of U.S. power. “European culture makes a strange distinction between an imaginary Israel that, as they say, ‘we hold to the highest standards,’ and actual policy of this government. Well, Europe is just going to have to learn to live with the democratically elected government of Israel.” Kney-Tal says he and the Israeli public miss any tone of “compassion” for Israel’s dilemma in the carefully calibrated statements of European politicians. He gives only German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer credit for having “gone the furthest in understanding the collective psyche of Israel.” Fischer has been criticized by opposition politicians for “obsequious” behavior toward Israel. Until recently in Germany, where atonement for the Holocaust has translated into unstinting support for the Jewish state, such an accusation would not have been considered a criticism. But even Germany decided two weeks ago to hold up arms deliveries to Israel in a move that was seen by some as a de facto embargo on weapons sales. A new plan by Fischer that would entail greater E.U. involvement in the peace process has not been formally accepted by the E.U., but it has been warmly received — with the exception perhaps of its offer to send German troops to monitor an Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire.

The discomfort of other European opinion-makers with Israeli policy elicits nothing but scorn from Kney-Tal. “These people,” he says, “are all pacifists. They don’t like Israel or the U.S. because we use force. They think all conflicts can be solved the way labor disputes are — through negotiation.” After Powell limped home, no European, or anyone else, could place much faith in negotiation. Yet the horrors — and perils — of placing faith in force seemed ever more clear.