Western Leaders' 'Posturing' Shuttle Visits to Israel an Effort to Buoy 'Hold on Power at Home'
© AP Photo / Evan Vucci
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UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak followed in the heels of US President Joe Biden to descend upon Tel Aviv on Thursday, telling his counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu that he "absolutely" supported Israel's right to defend itself. Meanwhile, over 3,300 people have been killed in the Gaza Strip since Israel began retaliatory air strikes on the enclave.
As they embark upon a flurry of visits to Tel Aviv amid the latest flare-up of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, European leaders are “demonstrating once again that their only concern is to strengthen their hold on power at home by photo ops in Israel,” and “posturing” alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Gilbert Doctorow, an international relations and Russian affairs analyst, told Sputnik.
“These visits are meaningful for demonstrating publicly that the leaders are backing fully one side to the conflict and so disqualify themselves as peacemakers. They also attract the attention of the Global South, heightening their contempt for Europe,” Doctorow underscored.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, US President Joe Biden, and now UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak have all made successive visits to Tel Aviv amid the latest violent escalation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. At the same time, ongoing hostilities in the Gaza Strip region show no signs of abating, with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) pounding what they claim are Hamas targets inside the Palestinian enclave.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak arrives at Ben Gurion airport, near Tel Aviv, Israel
© AP Photo / Ohad Zwigenberg
On October 7, the Palestinian group Hamas launched a surprise large-scale attack against Israel from the Gaza Strip. After it breached the border, killing and seizing people in neighboring Israeli communities, Tel Aviv launched retaliatory strikes and ordered a complete blockade of the Gaza Strip, home to more than two million people, cutting off supplies of food, water, and fuel. Thousands of dead and injured have been reported on both sides as a result of the escalation.
The Gaza death toll has already exceeded 3,300, according to Palestinian authorities. One million people have been displaced in the span of 10 days, according to the United Nations. Furthermore, since the start of the complete blockage of the Gaza Strip by Israel, the Palestinian Ministry of Health warned of a severe shortage of medicines, water, and growing risk of an outbreak of disease in the besieged enclave. On Tuesday, even European Council President Charles Michel admitted that the siege of the Gaza Strip by Israel violates international humanitarian law.
"When you cut the basic infrastructure, when you cut access to water, when you cut electricity, if you do not allow food to be delivered, this is not in line with the international law," Michel told reporters in Brussels after an extraordinary video conference of the European Council on the situation in the Middle East.
Furthermore, over 500 perished in a blast at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in northern Gaza on Tuesday night, where locals were sheltering from Israeli airstrikes. The Israeli and Palestinian authorities have blamed each other for the fatal incident. Hamas said that a missile was launched by the IDF, while Israeli officials put the blame on the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement - something the latter denied in a statement. US President Joe Biden, during a meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday, laid the responsibility for the Gaza hospital blast on the "other team," and not on Israel.
19 October 2023, 06:41 GMT
‘Gesture Politics’
As for European leaders, they "have nothing to offer to the parties to the conflict except some small donations that are meaningless in the face of the total devastation that Israel is now dealing out to Gaza," Gilbert Doctorow emphasized.
“I'm not sure whether Europe or European leaders can do anything. It is just gesture politics when it comes to their visits to Israel and having discussions and talks with Benjamin Netanyahu. So by doing this and traveling to Israel and meeting with the Israeli politicians, they reaffirm and show their support and they pledge allegiance to Israel and to the Israeli course," Adriel Kasonta, a London-based foreign affairs analyst and former chairman of the International Affairs Committee at the Bow Group think tank, told Sputnik.
This flurry of shuttle diplomacy cannot but call to mind the eagerness with which all these Western leaders have been making forays to Kiev. As they made a bee-line for Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, the aforementioned politicians have offered him successive vast weapons packages that have failed to impact the stuttering counteroffensive, while only further fanning the flames of the ongoing NATO proxy war against Russia. The same Western leaders have made no bones about being ready to prop up Kiev “to the last Ukrainian.”
So the optics of another round of such so-called “peacemaking” shuttling, with vows to "absolutely" support Israel's right to defend itself, while the death toll accumulates in the enclave, feed into speculation that, similar to Ukraine, the back-and-forth visits will fail to defuse tensions.
18 October 2023, 15:51 GMT
Weighing in on speculation whether there are tools to influence Israel with regard to its mulled ground operation in Gaza, Doctorow said:
“On one side of the equation, the USA has such tools if it ever wished to use them, which so far it seems they do not. By offering $10 billion in aid to Israel, Washington just has to add conditions. If it were at all serious in defending Israel, the first condition would be the immediate replacement of the entire Netanyahu Cabinet and its replacement from among the opposition parties. Netanyahu and company are personally responsible for negligence arising from hubris that enabled the Hamas attack on October 7. Netanyahu personally is responsible for having aided and abetted the Hamas control of Gaza as a counterbalance to the Palestinian Authority of [President Mahmoud] Abbas.”
Adriel Kasonta voiced the opinion that the only country that “holds cards as far as the Israel and Palestine conflict is concerned is the United States.” Underscoring that Washington was the greatest supporter of the Israeli state, “especially when the sale of armaments is concerned and also providing money for Israel,” Kasonta, however, pointed to the recent move by the US to oppose the United Nations motion to establish a humanitarian corridor to Gaza.
“So I think that the United States have already made their decision to allow Israel to do whatever they want with regards to the Palestinian people and Gaza itself,” said the foreign affairs analyst.
Adriel Kasonta speculated that Russia and China were emerging as two countries that “oppose what is happening with the Palestinian people and what is happening in Gaza.” He voiced the opinion that these two countries could “support the outcome of this conflict by using their powers, their soft power.”
“I think that these two… great powers, as I said, China and Russia, can influence and should influence global opinion and somehow influence Israel itself. We know that many expats from Russia are living in Israel. We know that Israel is very much interested in having good economic relations with China. So I think that these two countries have certain leverages to use and to influence Israel to spare the lives of the Palestinian people. As we can see at the moment, this doesn't look very well. And I'm not sure whether the two-state solution is still on the table. It certainly doesn't look this way at the moment,” Kasonta underscored.
18 October 2023, 17:39 GMT
According to the ex-chairman of the International Affairs Committee at the Bow Group think tank, there is currently little “will on the side of the Israeli government to spare lives of the Palestinian people, because they are using its bogus arguments of trying to raze Gaza to the ground in order to destroy Hamas.” Adriel Kasonta deplored the huge humanitarian crisis which is already unfolding, and warned that the actions of Israel would “destroy the two-state solution project completely.”
“Certainly, if the United State would not greenlight the actions of the Israeli government, Israel would not conduct this annihilation of the Palestinian population,” Kasonta believed.
18 October 2023, 10:02 GMT
The US has readily used the escalation of hostilities to assemble a show of force in the region, sending to the eastern Mediterranean near Israel two US Navy carrier strike groups led by the USS Gerald Ford and the USS Dwight D Eisenhower. Furthermore, another navy ship - US 6th Fleet Blue Ridge-class command and control ship the USS Mount Whitney LCC 20 - was deployed from its homeport in the central Italian coastal city of Gaeta to support US operations in the aforementioned area. President Biden’s moves do nothing for de-escalation, Gilbert Doctorow argued, saying:
“Biden wrongfully believes that the presence of the US aircraft carrier task forces off of Israeli shores ensures de-escalation, because it deters Iran and Syria from entering the conflict in a second front against Israel. On the contrary, the US naval presence heightens regional tensions and sets the stage for a regional, if not global war."
