Our Wednesday News Analysis | Europe’s Moral Crisis: The Crumbling Shield around Israel

A pro-Palestine protest in Barcelona, Spain. (Photo: Marc Asensio, The Palestine Chronicle)

"Polling from March 2026 shows that 56 percent of Spaniards and Italians oppose US-Israeli military action in Iran.
Public opinion increasingly sees these not as separate crises, but as interconnected fronts of a single, failed policy.

The rejection of war is part of a broader rejection of Israeli military policy and the alignment of European governments with it.
These shifts have not only isolated Israel; they have begun to isolate its allies.
Aside from Donald Trump and his full alignment with Netanyahu’s agenda,
the era of a unified Western bloc catering unquestioningly to Israel’s demands is fading.

The traditional explanation for Europe’s backing—historical guilt over the Holocaust—no longer explains the conduct of political elites.
A more accurate explanation lies in Europe’s own legacy of colonial violence and racial hierarchy."

However, the real shift lies with civil society and the resilience of Palestinians, who have bypassed traditional media filters to speak directly to the world.

The European Union is the “chief of all cowards,” Amnesty International declared in a searing statement issued on April 21. The condemnation was a direct response to the European bloc’s systemic failure to sever ties with Israel during the Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Luxembourg.

Despite months of legal warnings, the EU once again prioritized procedural safety over the urgency of human life.

The efforts to press the EU to take a moral position were finally led by a coalition of Spain, Ireland, and Slovenia, later joined by Belgium. They argued that the EU-Israel Association Agreement—the legal framework governing their trade relationship—is predicated on the “respect for human rights.”

To maintain this agreement while the extreme violations in occupied Palestine continue is to render the EU’s own founding treaties meaningless.

Such a decision, even if belated, would have done immeasurable good. It would have restored a measure of the EU’s shattered credibility and re-enlivened the discussion on international law. More importantly, it would have initiated a series of concrete measures to hold Israel accountable and provided Palestinians with a tangible sense of hope...

Read more: Europe’s Moral Crisis: The Crumbling Shield around Israel

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THE WEST’S BUBBLE OF ILLUSION ABOUT ISRAEL – AND ABOUT ITSELF – IS FINALLY BEING BURST

Source: Jonathan Cook Blog
https://www.jonathan-cook.net/2026-05-01/west-bubble-illusion-israel/

Published May1, 2026

The genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon exhausted the West’s moral legitimacy. Now Iran is slowly exhausting the West’s military primacy

For decades, two irreconciliable narratives about Israel and its motivations have existed in parallel.

Israel was, indeed, implanted in the region eight decades ago as a highly militarised client state whose primary job was to project Western power into the oil-rich Middle East.

… “plucky” Israel helped the US [ed. the West] construct a self-serving narrative that required the containment
and the overthrow of secular nationalist governments in the Middle East while protecting backward-looking monarchies
that cosplayed opposition to Israel as they secretly colluded with it.

The region’s resulting states, embattled and divided, were ripe for control.
They lacked the kind of accountable governments that would need to be responsive to their publics
and might ally to protect the region’s interests from Western colonial interference.

Now, Iran is stress-testing this decades-old system to destruction.
It is forcing the Gulf states to choose: will they continue to serve the US, even though it has shown it cannot protect them,
or ally with Iran as it emerges as a new great power, levying fees to pass through the strait?

The West is quickly learning that cheap drones can elude even its most sophisticated detection systems,
and that a few mines and gunboats can choke off much of the fuel the global economy depends on.

The bubble of illusion has finally burst.

On the one side, an official Western narrative portrays a plucky, besieged “Jewish” state of Israel, desperate to make peace with its hostile Arab neighbours. Even to this day, that story dominates the political, media and academic landscape.

Time and again, or so we are told, Israel has held out an olive branch to “the Arabs”, seeking acceptance, but is always rebuffed.

A largely unspoken subtext suggests that supposedly irrational, bloodthirsty, Jew-hating regimes across the region would have completed the Nazis’ exterminationist agenda but for the West’s humane protection of a vulnerable minority.

A Palestinian counter-narrative, accepted across much of the rest of the world, is choked into silence in the West as an antisemitic “blood libel”.

It presents Israel as an ethnic supremacist, highly militaristic state – armed by the United States and Europe – bent on expansion, mass expulsions and land theft.

On this view, the West implanted Israel as a colonial military outpost, there to subdue the native Palestinian population, and terrorise neighbouring states into submission through relentless and overwhelming displays of force.

Palestinians cannot make peace, or reach any kind of accommodation, because Israel pursues only conquest, domination and erasure. No middle ground is possible.

The proof, note Palestinians, is Israel’s long-standing refusal to define its borders. As its military power has grown decade after decade, ever more extreme political agendas have surfaced, demanding not just Israel’s takeover of the last remnants of the Palestinian territories it illegally occupies but expansion into neighbouring states like Lebanon and Syria...

Read more: The West’s bubble of illusion about Israel – and about itself – is finally being burst

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GERMANY HAD A GRAND SETTLEMENT PROJECT. IT COLLAPSED OVERNIGHT

Source: Haaretz
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2026-05-01/ty-article-opinion/.highlight/germany-had-a-grand-settlement-project-it-collapsed-overnight/0000019d-e4e7-dba5-a1ff-ede77bb10000

By Ofri Ilany
Published May 1, 2026

Over a century ago, German settlers took over lands in the east, obtained state support, and made the locals' lives miserable. Like their Israeli counterparts today, they, too, thought they were there to stay

Germans returning home from the east in 1945. To this day there are communities in Germany itself that preserve the memory of the cities and villages they left, and are eager to return to them. Credit: The German Federal Archives

All of this ended in defeat, surrender, and reparations; in economic and political crises that continued for decades; and in another world war and national suicide. And then, when the Red Army finally advanced on Berlin, the Germans fled from all the regions the Russians had conquered. One day, the same will happen to the settlers who are today terrorizing the Jordan Valley, Southern Mount Hebron, the Etzion Bloc, and the rest of the territories. Some sufficiently powerful force will advance from the east and catch Israel in its weakness. The settlement project will fold up hastily, just like the Germans' project did in the east.

To what lines will Israel flee? That will likely be determined by the balance of forces and the outcome of a future war.
Not by international law, not by academics, or by rulings handed down by international courts.
A possible forced withdrawal might halt at the 1967 Green Line, or go further.
One way or the other, it won't be a pleasant sight.
Just ask the Germans in the east.

Visitors to Eastern Europe – for example, to Wroclaw in Poland, Liberec in the Czech Republic, Chernivtsi in Ukraine, or Kaliningrad in Russia – will encounter many streets, buildings, and monuments with German names, despite the fact that the languages spoken there are Slavic. In the past, these cities themselves bore German names, and the majority of their inhabitants spoke German, including a large proportion of the city's Jews.

Wroclaw was Breslau, the capital of Silesia; Liberec was known as Reichenberg, the capital of the Sudetenland; Chernivtsi was Czernowitz, the capital of Bukovina; and Kaliningrad was Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia. Germans lived and flourished in these places for many centuries. They were born and died there, and could probably not imagine a future in which the cities would be emptied of their German inhabitants.

But one day it happened. Immediately after the end of World War II, in the wake of the defeat of the Nazis, the vast majority of the German population was expelled from Eastern Europe and fled into East and West Germany. About half a million Germans were expelled from Breslau and 200,000 from Königsberg. The Sudetens (i.e., the Czech Germans) evacuated Sudetenland, and the Germans of Bukovina also left.

As they fled, many of them were killed. The others became embittered refugees in Germany. To this day, there are communities in Germany itself that preserve the memory of the cities and villages they left, and are eager to return to them. Occasionally, they embark on journeys to abandoned German cemeteries, located today in locales bearing Slavic names...

Read more: Germany Had a Grand Settlement Project. It Collapsed Overnight