Justified shock and outrage over the Hamas atrocities in Israel are driving some European politicians into ill-judged responses that risk exacerbating this crisis. Four European Union member states – Austria, Germany, Denmark and Sweden – have announced they will review and temporarily suspend their bilateral development aid to the Palestinian territories. On Monday, the EU commissioner Olivér Várhelyi unexpectedly declared – in a social media post – a freeze on EU development assistance to the Palestinians worth €690m. The scale of terror against Israel was “a turning point”, Várhelyi wrote. Providing around €300m annually, the EU is the occupied territories’ largest international source of aid.
The Hungarian commissioner’s solo, and seemingly unauthorised, move was later reversed after a backlash from several governments, along with objections from the EU’s chief diplomat, Josep Borrell, and the European Council president Charles Michel. The EU will now review its aid, not formally suspend it. Várhelyi – who was nominated by the Hungarian premier Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Benjamin Netanyahu – is in charge of EU relations with neighbouring countries and rarely misses an opportunity to position himself as Israel’s staunchest ally in Brussels.
With the purse strings in the hands of Várhelyi, who has repeatedly blocked funds for Palestinians, uncertainty remains over further EU aid disbursements. A meeting of EU foreign ministers on Tuesday made clear that an overwhelming majority is opposed to freezing EU funds (ironically including some of those whose governments have suspended their bilateral aid).
The ultimate responsibility for further EU aid delivery lies with the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who has a reputation for tight centralisation of power within the Brussels executive, but allowed a surprising degree of leeway to the Hungarian commissioner’s freelancing.
That suspending aid was even considered, and remains a possibility, is mind-boggling. If the goal is to punish Hamas, stopping European aid makes no sense. The EU and its member states do not fund Hamas. Freezing assistance would instead punish the EU-backed Palestinian Authority (PA), which is Hamas’s chief rival. By further weakening the PA and increasing the prospect of its collapse in the West Bank, suspending the funds would be a gift to Hamas.
Most of all, however, it would hit ordinary Palestinians. Stopping aid follows the same logic as the collective punishment that is now being inflicted on Gaza by Israel. Incidentally, it is also the same logic that leads Hamas to hold all Israeli civilians responsible for the Israeli occupation, dispossession and violence against Palestinians.
As Israel now proceeds with an all-out military retaliation against the Gaza Strip, resulting in yet more civilian bloodshed and destruction, Palestinians urgently need more aid, not less. The EU’s money funds teachers, doctors and other public servants employed by the PA in the West Bank. It contributes to PA social allowances for thousands of the poorest Palestinian families in both Gaza and the West Bank. It helps cover the costs of Palestinian hospitals in East Jerusalem, finances grants to small innovative enterprises, co-funds desalination plants in Gaza and supports NGOs. About a third of the total goes to UNRWA, the UN agency providing education and healthcare to millions of Palestinian refugees, which is already mired in a chronic financial crisis due to dwindling donor support. If the agency goes bust, 300,000 children attending UNRWA schools in Gaza will end up on the street or attending Hamas-run schools instead.
Gaza has been driven into a state of high dependency on international support – more than 80% of its population rely on humanitarian aid to meet their basic needs – mainly as a consequence of an ongoing 16-year blockade and a series of devastating Israeli military offensives against Hamas in the densely populated enclave.
Reviewing the funding to verify that it does not support Hamas or any violent activity is entirely legitimate. But pre-emptive aid suspensions only validate fake conspiracy narratives about the EU funding terrorists. The EU and member states already review their aid to the Palestinians on a regular basis, with no misuse detected. EU aid to Palestine is in fact subject to more robust safeguards and monitoring than other cases, with the screening of tens of thousands of individual Palestinian beneficiaries.
Indeed, in a jab at Várhelyi as the commissioner who has overseen disbursement to the Palestinian territories for the past four years, Borrell remarked that if “we discover that we have been funding Hamas terrorist activities, someone will have to take a political responsibility for that”.
Even Israel has claimed no evidence of EU money going into Hamas pockets. On the contrary, Israeli officials have always quietly encouraged international donors to continue the flow of aid to Palestinian territories, including to Gaza, because it effectively subsidises Israel’s occupation and blockade, and has helped to ensure relative stability. If the aid flow stops, Palestinians will be again the ones to pay the price, with even more crushing poverty and human pain.
As European taxpayers, our aid merely compensates for the suffocating impact of the Israeli policies that restrict Palestinian trade, movement and access to land, and prevent them from developing their own economy – and for the lack of international political will to change the situation. This unjust status quo, a permanent denial of basic rights and freedoms to millions of Palestinians, backed by western complacency, is at the root of recurrent eruptions of violence – although it never justifies them.
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Rightful indignation at Hamas’s deplorable crimes can now be politically channelled in two opposite ways. One is a tribalist, populist route of collectively blaming all Palestinians, cheering on a vengeful Israeli reprisal, remaining blind to Palestinian suffering, and fuelling more atrocious violence in the future.
The other is solidarity with all victims, realisation that this conflict cannot be allowed to fester and a serious push for a sustainable political solution based on equal rights and security of the two peoples.
In the EU, Várhelyi and Borrell symbolise these two opposite approaches. Where will the rest of the international community stand?
Martin Konečný runs the European Middle East Project (EuMEP), a Brussels-based NGO
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