Sixty thousand dead. Twenty thousand children. Two hundred and forty-eight murdered journalists. How many victims were needed for Brussels to come out of his silence?
It took more than 700 days of massacres for the European Parliament to adopt its first resolution on Gaza.
The contrast to Ukraine is striking. In a few months, the European Union had adopted more than thirty resolutions and eighteen trains of sanctions against Russia in Putin. Faced with the government of Netanyahu, accused of war crimes and massive violations of international law, it was silence. Two weights, two measures that have become unbearable. As Manon Aubry, European MP for the left reminded, it took two years of genocide for the EU to agree to open his eyes.
The resolution adopted is a first breach. It calls for sanctioning settlers and ministers of the Israeli government, to apply the mandates of the International Criminal Court, to investigate the assassination of 248 journalists and to suspend European military funding. This advance is not the fruit of a moral start in institutions, but that of immense popular mobilization across Europe, relayed by some political forces in parliament.
But this first step remains very far from the account. The European Union still refuses to recognize the genocide, does not impose any embargo on arms and is limited to a partial suspension of the association agreement with Israel. The right and the extreme right, supported by the Ursula von der Leyen commission, continue to protect at all costs Netanyahu, even at the cost of complicity with its crimes.
History will severely judge blindness and European inertia. When it comes to Gaza, every day of delay costs lives. Faced with a genocide, there are no half-measures.
This is why mobilization must continue, on the street as in institutions. The resolution voted is not an end in itself, but the proof that popular pressure can crack the wall of silence. The fight must continue, until the embargo, until the end of European complicity, until Palestine is free.
