Gaza war agitates a divided Europe

Welcome back. Five months on, the Gaza war continues to complicate European diplomacy, unsettle public opinion and inflame the domestic politics of individual countries. The bitter truth is that there’s not much the EU can do to determine the conflict’s outcome, yet the longer the fighting goes on, the more Europe is exposed to its consequences. I’m at tony.barber@ft.com.

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Governments and societies divided

The political fallout from the Gaza war extends beyond Europe to other democracies, above all the US. President Joe Biden’s comfortable victory in last month’s Democratic primary in Michigan came with a warning sign — the defection of many Arab-American and other voters opposed to his support for Israel.

Michigan is expected to be a crucial swing state in November’s presidential contest. As the FT’s Lauren Fedor and James Politi reported, Biden defeated Donald Trump in Michigan in the 2020 presidential election by about 150,000 votes, only slightly higher than the number of Arab-Americans who voted in the Midwestern state that year.

In Europe, the war’s repercussions are no less serious. Claudia De Martino and Ruth Hanau Santini, writing for Aspenia Online, put it succinctly in an article in December:

The war in Gaza represents a new political cleavage in Europe, one that cuts across at least three groupings of EU countries, marks a widening gap between government stances and public opinion, and in parallel dramatically increases antisemitism and Islamophobia.

European diplomacy on the defensive

The damage to European diplomacy in the Middle East and farther afield takes several forms. In the first place, the Gaza war has dealt a blow to the efforts of European governments to rally the rest of the world behind Ukraine in its war of self-defence against Russia.

Luigi Scazzieri of the Centre for European Reform writes:

Europe’s unwillingness to take concrete steps to restrain Israel’s military operations in Gaza has strengthened the narrative that the west is guilty of double standards, treating the struggle to support Ukraine as a fight for the future of the rules-based international order while being unwilling to hold Israel to account.

Second, the war places a question mark over the credibility of Europe’s “soft power” — often seen as an important asset for a continent somewhat deficient in military weight. In this article for the European Council on Foreign Relations, James Lynch contends that Europe’s “soft power” derives from its economic prosperity and the social values associated with it.

Yet, he says:

Europe’s soft power in the Arab world may have suffered irreversible harm . . . European officials seem to have calculated that they can bear this short-term reputational damage, believing that, once the violence in Gaza recedes, Europe’s standing relations with the Arab world will return to normal.

But this is a miscalculation: perceptions of the west are tanking across the region.

UN votes expose a split Europe

Third, European governments are divided among themselves, as we see in the chart below, which shows how they voted on two UN General Assembly resolutions in October and December.

In the first vote, which called for a truce (not a ceasefire), eight EU states were in favour, four were against and 15 abstained. In the second vote, which called for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” and the unconditional release of Israeli hostages, 17 EU states were in favour, two were against and eight abstained.

Needless to say, such splits make it difficult for Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, to set out a diplomatic position that is broad enough to rally all 27 governments behind it, while not being so vague as to render its impact on the war irrelevant.

A tale of two countries: the Czech Republic and Spain

Why are Europe’s divisions on the Middle East so profound? One answer is that they are rooted in the history of each EU member state, from the 1918-1939 era to the latter half of the 20th century.

To throw light on this, I’ll look at two countries: the Czech Republic and Spain. The Czechs are among Israel’s firmest supporters in the EU, while the Spaniards are among the most pro-Palestinian.

A lucid analysis of Czech solidarity with Israel appears in this article by Tomáš Zdechovský. He concentrates on the Soviet-backed communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948 and the collapse of communism in the Velvet Revolution of 1989:

For most of the time between 1948 and 1989, the Soviet Union maintained close relations with Arab countries hostile to Israel, and Moscow’s satellites were forced to apply the same policy in the Middle East.

After 1989, a pro-Israeli position represented an affirmation of the Czechs’ right to forge an independent, albeit US-aligned, foreign policy.

Zdechovský makes the important point that Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, the president of the Czechoslovak state created after the first world war and a much admired figure in modern Czech history, was known for his campaigning against antisemitism and sympathies with Zionism.

By contrast, Spain has had a more troubled relationship with Israel, not even establishing full diplomatic ties until 1986, almost four decades after Israel’s creation.

This was partly because of Israel’s hostility to the Franco dictatorship, which lasted from Spain’s 1936-1939 civil war to 1975 and was at times ferociously antisemitic — as set out in Paul Preston’s book Architects of Terror, which I reviewed for the FT last year.

Meanwhile, post-1945 Spain tried to build close ties with the Arab and Muslim world, with one eye on the need for stability in north African neighbours across the Mediterranean.

It is noteworthy that, although Spanish politics is polarised between left and right (not to mention between the central government in Madrid and separatists in Catalonia), the pro-Palestinian cause unites almost all political forces.

One exception is the far-right Vox party. However, before Vox’s emergence, Spanish parliamentary groups of diverse political stripes backed a proposal in 2014 to recognise Palestine as a state in an almost unanimous vote.

Public opinion: no single view, or no view at all

Where do European voters stand on the conflict? As this FT analysis shows, more than half of those surveyed by YouGov in May 2023 in seven western European countries, as well as the US, expressed the view that the Israel-Palestinian issue didn’t matter to them very much, or not at all, or they didn’t know.

In a subsequent YouGov poll (below), conducted in November and December, many voters remained uncommitted. Between 24 and 31 per cent in the European seven — Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the UK — said they sympathised with both sides. Another 27 to 37 per cent said they were unsure.

This suggests that the passionately held views of politically conscious and active citizens, whether pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, are by no means representative of European societies as a whole.

That said, the YouGov surveys point to certain trends in western European and US public opinion. Broadly speaking, younger voters (those up to 29) are more sympathetic to the Palestinians, and older voters (especially those over 45) tend to be more pro-Israeli.

At the same time, many left-leaning voters side more with the Palestinians, while many of those on the right take a more pro-Israeli line.

Far right and far left

With regard to European political parties, a striking feature is the tendency of the far right, once indelibly associated with antisemitism, to adopt an anti-Palestinian stance.

This is closely connected with the far right’s vitriol against Islam and its place in modern Europe, as is visible in countries with large Muslim minorities such as France and the Netherlands.

By contrast, the radical left stands out for its attacks on Israel. In this commentary, Anna Mier y Teran of Spain’s Universidad de Navarra suggests that leftists “may view the situation through the lens of social justice, anti-Americanism or antisemitism”.

In France, the denunciations of Israel by the radical leftist politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon early in the war made him “the most toxic political figure in the country”, according to Leila Abboud, the FT’s Paris bureau chief.

There have been well-documented incidents of antisemitism in the UK’s opposition Labour party, whose leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has been battling to stamp them out ahead of an election later this year that Labour appears on course to win.

Across Europe, it appears that large numbers of people don’t feel strongly committed to Israel or the Palestinians, but that politics is nevertheless being convulsed by a conflict over which European governments have limited influence.

More on this topic

Ukraine vs Gaza — a commentary by John Raine for the International Institute for Strategic Studies

Tony’s picks of the week

• The cocktail of policies that defines Joe Biden’s presidency includes lashings of internationalism spiked with an “America first” approach on economic matters, FT contributing editor Adam Tooze says

• The Spanish economy is distinctive for its high levels of immigration, high unemployment and insufficient growth in per capita gross domestic product, Carmen González Enríquez writes for the Madrid-based Elcano Royal Institute