Inaction renders Europe complicit in illegal acts in the Middle East. It can no longer play third fiddle
Today's miserable standoff in the Middle East requires new initiatives. The short-term failure of Israeli policies has concentrated global attention on their blockade of Gaza rather than on Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons. The long-term failure has rendered increasingly difficult a two-state solution as Palestine is broken up into barriered Bantustans.
As President Obama's military commanders have told him, the absence of anything resembling a peace process in the Middle East, and the identification of Washington with a very rightwing Israeli government, has made it more difficult for the US to deal with Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and others.
If politics does not succeed, then humanitarian aid will continue to be necessary. Yet we should never depend on the provision of humanitarian relief as an excuse for diplomatic drift and the failure to confront intransigence. Organisations such as Medical Aid for Palestinians do not exist so that others can duck their moral and political responsibilities.
The EU has a role to play to break this logjam. It is Israel's biggest trade partner and the largest provider of development assistance to Palestine, yet it has been content to play a quiet third fiddle to the US. There have been exceptions. In 1980, the EU heads of government and foreign ministers agreed the Venice declaration, which noted that "traditional ties and common interests" obliged them to play "a special role ... to work in a more concrete way towards peace". They spelled out their commitment to the right to existence and security of all the states in the region, including Israel, and "justice for all the peoples, which implies recognition of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people". They denounced settlement activity as illegal, refused to accept any unilateral initiative to change the status of Jerusalem, urged a just solution to the problem of Palestinian refugees, and supported a comprehensive peace settlement sustained by a decision of the UN security council.
However, the EU has too often since taken the view that only Washington really drives things forward. Yet what should the EU do when American policy is going nowhere? Not surprisingly, the secretary-general of the Arab League called the so-called quartet (the EU, US, UN and Russia), which supervised the non-implementation of the road map for peace, "the quartet sans trois".
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