By Prof. Silverio Allocca (DIPLOMATICINFO.COM GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST)
On December 12, 2023, in a vote with a historic outcome, the United Nations General Assembly called for an immediate ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
In favor, four days after the U.S. vetoed the Security Council, more than three-fourths of the 193 members including France, Spain and Poland, against were the U.S., Israel and eight other countries, while 25 countries, including Italy, the U.K. and Germany, abstained.
The Palestinian ambassador to the UN, Riyad Mansour, rightly noted that the vote in favor of a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza was a “historic day in terms of the strong message sent by the General Assembly,” adding that “It is our collective duty to continue on this path until we see an end to this aggression against our people“-significant words that, however, ultimately do not change the situation one iota.
What is much more interesting, however, is something else and concerns Biden’s statements on the sidelines of the vote, statements that hint at much more than he has said about the reasons that have so far guided White House policy-and glimpses of future developments in the situation in the Middle East.
As was intended, Biden unloads Israeli PM Netanyahu, who after the end of this war will surely have no more office to hold given, for sum, the judicial pendencies that for certain will formalize his final exit from the scene with a one-way ticket that Israeli judicial system will surely put in his hands, under current law, given the charges in the proceedings against him and the caliber of the prosecution witnesses.
But the change of course, as is easy to foresee at this point, which will take place in “due course,” will obviously not only affect him since in all likelihood with the PM will also see its own end, his party, that Likud which expressed the current Government: a government that the President of the United States has called, stigmatizing it in no uncertain terms, “the most conservative government in Israel’s history” and adding his personal invitation addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “strengthen and change” the Israeli Executive stressing how the same “does not want a two-state solution” with the Palestinians.
Harsh, forceful words, read by the international press as a full-blown delegitimization even though, in fact, Netanyahu and his Government have been allowed to act-and still will be allowed to act-for as long as it takes to complete what was started after October 7, 2023 for the economic-strategic reasons amply illustrated, and absolutely not to have failed despite the deaths and destruction suffered by the people of Gaza, in an article in the December 7, 2023 Diplomaticinfo.entitled, not coincidentally, ” ON THE SIDELINES OF THE EVENTS IN GAZA: THE VIOLENCE THE GROWN-UPS PRETEND NOT TO SEE.” interests that make the two-state solution alluded to by Biden patently impractical and exceedingly impractical after decades of conflict and even more so after all that has happened in these weeks of intense fighting.
In this sense I dissent from what was stated by Elena Basile, former Ambassador to Belgium and Sweden, during an interview with Andrea Lanzetta and reported in an article that appeared on December 8, 2023 in the weekly TPI with the title “Elena Basile to TPI: “To get to peace you have to negotiate with everyone” : “The brief truce in Gaza shows that you can negotiate even with Hamas. Under the table it has always been done. But the EU is subordinate to the US. On Palestine as on Ukraine.”
I dissent for a whole host of reasons among which is at the top of the list the kind of approach that highlights the insistent deep furrow between politics (with all its annexes and connections including diplomatic aspects) and the world of business and economic-financial interests, a world, the latter, that does not depend on politics but on politics -and its instruments and services, among which is the diplomatic apparatus- it uses.
Unfortunately, the new course, which for the Old World saw the light of day with the birth of the Euro, increasingly depriving the public sector of its entrepreneurial role for the benefit of the private sector, has meant that politics has been deprived of real bargaining power to assert when it has found itself in the position of mediating between the interests -even geopolitical interests- of local and international private business and those of national communities at large.
The failure to take this salient aspect into account is what made Basile’s analysis, when she spoke of the EU’s subalternity to the U.S., deficient in all respects in that it failed to grasp the profound difference between a European Union created at the behest of its member states in order to implement an endogenous process of political, cultural, unification and integration, fiscal and economic – and a United Europe born out of a precise need of the United States as an integrated structure from the sole monetary point of view, which in fact was well received here by us in the first place because it responded to a precise need relating to the exchange ratios between the different national currencies, exchange ratios that were exceedingly unstable due to a monetary environment characterized and penalized for years by that 1971 declaration of non-convertibility of the USD that had decreed the end of the monetary system born out of the Bretton Woods Agreements of 1944.
This simple consideration would have allowed Ambassador Basile to avoid her vaguely sovereignist and completely illogical sic stantibus rebus externalization, since it is patently inadmissible being the EU’s subalternity to the United States inherent in the very genetics of the European Union and which, by the way, is at the basis of its entire expansive policy towards the East when, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the admission to the EU of the former satellite countries of the Soviet Union responded to a precise strategic need of NATO: That of encompassing all the countries formerly under the aegis of Moscow as desired by the neoliberal logic of U.S. lobbies.
The other salient aspect underlying the rejection of Basile’s reading, which only ends up feeding the illusions of those who read it, is that of the failure to take into account the fact that the current Middle East crisis takes place in an expanded context that is the child of globalization, of the crisis experienced by it due to the distortions that emerged with the pandemic, which in turn are the consequence of an excessive imbalance towards the tertiary sector of the economies of Western countries, which have thus deprived themselves (once again due to the prevalence of profit maximization needs over logics marked by the stabilization of international relations) of a bargaining force of no secondary interest in the geopolitical sphere when they found themselves in the condition of having to reckon with China and its leadership within the BRICS.
It follows from this further premise that the hypothesis of an old-style diplomatic solution to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute leading to the construction of two neighboring states clearly enjoys no credibility because for the United States, the West in general and Russia-and a fortiori for China and the BRICS-this would represent an unnecessary further taking on over time the consequences of the political mistakes made by the Great Powers and their allies in the Middle East in years past: and it matters little that those who wish to extricate themselves from those consequences include those who were the prime movers of those mistakes, beginning with Russia and the United States.
At this point, in sum, it is as clear as ever that underlying the choice, deplorable as it may be, of the United States (explicitly) and most of the EU states (indirectly given their abstention at the last UN vote), to unconditionally support Netanyahu and his government in this war, whatever the cost, there is a logic that for the first time has seen the White House playing its own game by anticipating Beijing’s possible and predictable moves in a context that sees Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates dialoguing with Tehran all ‘cheerfully’ militating in the ranks of those BRICS to which the UAE has for some time testified to its significant allegiance with the announcement a few days ago of its decision to deal in currencies other than the USD in trade negotiations concerning oil.
To have now, in such a context, a solution to the conflict involving two independent and sovereign states on the ground, a solution perhaps achieved through Xi Jinping’s diplomatic mediation and secured by Beijing’s investment, with a Palestinian state overlooking the undersea gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean that, grateful for Chinese intervention, might also have decided to declare itself willing to accommodate-for its greater protection-the Dragon’s military ships at some coastal base, is a hypothesis that, being far from peregrine, was blatantly and with good reason intended to make it immediately impossible to realize: which, incidentally, would explain the prompt deployment, after the events of Nov. 7, of no less than two U.S. air-naval strike teams off the Israeli coast, stationed there certainly not to confront an Iranian or Hezbollah pronouncement, which, by the way, as Basile also noted, continue to maintain a low profile.
“It seems to me that Hezbollah and Iran are being very cautious and not allowing themselves to be drawn into the escalation. Hezbollah is in government in Lebanon. Iran is struggling to come out of its isolation. Thanks to Beijing’s mediation, it is in dialogue with Riyadh“: these are Basile’s exact words on the subject, words countered by the double-dealing words of a Biden who in some ways distances himself from Netanyahu, but at the same time, as seen, votes against the resolution, which having no binding power remains exactly as before.
And little use is made of the byzantinisms of certain recollections evoked by Basile when in the course of the aforementioned interview she said, “The negotiations on the hostages and the truce showed that with Hamas one negotiates and in fact has always negotiated secretly. The West should have been doing that since 2007. I remember that Hamas in the 2006 elections promised to recognize the Palestinian state in exchange for the recognition of Palestinian subjectivity. As it was with the PLO, politics and mediation could have defeated the maximalism and terrorist approach led to see armed struggle as the only solution. The West on the contrary isolated Hamas and then allowed Qatari funding.“
No, all this proves absolutely nothing, indeed perhaps if anything it proves the exact opposite: what speaks, in fact, are the events that kicked off last October 7 after a good two years of preparation, on a par with those put in place by Israel in the days to follow, facts that testify to a radicalization of hatred between the two communities, a hatred that what happened recently has only increased and of whose analysis one could fill-and in fact will fill for decades to come- entire libraries and video libraries without affecting today, which remains tied to a scenario in which the different actors play a game that of human life little cares.
And this is what we must pay attention to in order to understand that perhaps it is time to read a few more books and watch a few less Tik-Tok.
