Jerusalem, Dome of the Rock, Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the background
Berthold Werner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Everyone knows it is possible for different groups of people to look at the same reality, see and acknowledge the same events, and still come to diametrically opposed conclusions. Since the Hamas terror attacks on Israel of October 7, 2023, we’ve seen this happening between Israel and many of its enemies in the West—on campuses and streets all over North America and Europe.
What is truly shocking, however, is to see this happening among leading officials of Israel on the one hand and the European Union on the other. These are not exuberant twenty-somethings stirred up by left-wing troublemakers; These are the adults in the room. They supposedly uphold a common Western democratic order, and lead a common civilization that shares the values of peace, tolerance, freedom, human rights, and human dignity.
As important as the question of the war between Israel and its enemies is, there is a more fundamental issue at stake: our so-called shared Western values seem to be failing us amid a worldview clash so sharp, stark, and consequential as to constitute a complete break, one that appears unbridgeable unless one side or the other profoundly changes its worldview.
This clash becomes painfully apparent if one compares the Israeli near-consensus on October 7 and its aftermath with the recently leaked report of the European External Action Service (EEAS—the EU’s de facto diplomatic corps). The EEAS paper is a summary of a late-2024 report of the European Union Special Representative (EUSR) for Human Rights. I will refer to both reports below.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu encapsulates the view of the great majority of Israelis, including many of those who oppose him politically and dislike him personally. His message is built on a series of basic points that he repeats in virtually every one of his communications.
Here is a key excerpt from his address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on July 25, 2024:
Like December 7th, 1941, and September 11th, 2001, October 7th is a day that will forever live in infamy. It was the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah. It began as a perfect day. Not a cloud in the sky. Thousands of young Israelis were celebrating at an outdoor music festival. And suddenly, at 6:29 a.m., as children were still sleeping soundly in their beds in the towns and kibbutzim next to Gaza, suddenly heaven turned into hell. Three thousand Hamas terrorists stormed into Israel. They butchered 1,200 people from 41 countries, including 39 Americans. Proportionately, compared to our population size, that’s like 20 9/11s in one day. And these monsters, they raped women, they beheaded men, they burnt babies alive, they killed parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents. They dragged 255 people, both living and dead, into the dark dungeons of Gaza….
The war in Gaza could end tomorrow if Hamas surrenders, disarms and returns all the hostages. But if they don’t, Israel will fight until we destroy Hamas’ military capabilities and its rule in Gaza and bring all our hostages home. The day after we defeat Hamas, a new Gaza can emerge. … But for the foreseeable future, we must retain overriding security control there to prevent the resurgence of terror, to ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel.”
Here, by contrast, is an excerpt from the EEAS report. I have included the boldface type as it appears in the original:
In response to the terrorist attacks of 7 October 2023, Israel launched an intense military campaign, involving the use of weapons with wide area effects in densely-populated [sic] areas, and severe restrictions on the entry and distribution of essential goods and services into Gaza. Early 2025, a two-month ceasefire temporarily allowed an increased inflow of humanitarian assistance. On 2 March 2025 however and for 11 weeks, Israeli authorities imposed a complete blockade on Gaza, entailing a ban on the entry of any supplies, including food, medicine and fuel. On 18 March 2025, Israel launched a new military operation: bombardment from the air, land and sea and expanded ground operations have resulted in civilian casualties, destruction of civilian infrastructure, including shelters and objects indispensable to the survival of the population, and large- scale [sic] displacement of people.”
Both of the above quotations describe the same situation. In regard to the events they describe, they can both claim to be broadly accurate. Both come from officials who speak in the name of key governing authorities in the democratic West that are supposedly allied with each other. Yet it is clear that these excerpts do not just differ regarding which aspects of a complex situation they highlight. The difference is more profound. They cannot both, in a deeper sense, be true.
Ever since shortly after the October 7 attacks on Israel, the EU has focused more on Israel’s alleged culpability for tragedies such as civilian deaths and displacement in Gaza than on the restraint Israel has shown in trying to protect civilians. Many EU officials have played a major role in the worldwide chorus claiming that Israel, in its defense of itself, has broken its obligation to uphold human rights. This has escalated to the point at which there is now a serious internal debate on whether the EU should distance itself significantly—and officially—from Israel.
In this context, EU Foreign Affairs High Rep Kaja Kallas announced the launch of a review assessing Israel’s compliance with Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, which conditions the agreement on both parties’ “respect for human rights and democratic principles.”
The purpose of the EEAS/EUSR reports is to help EU foreign ministers accomplish that review, and assess whether the EU should declare Israel in violation of Article 2 of the Association Agreement, and thus whether it should sanction Israel in some way, all the way up to possible suspension of the agreement.
In line with the Article 2 review, the reports are focused on whether violations of international human rights law (IHRL) and international humanitarian law (IHL) have occurred. The tone of both reports is gracelessly clinical and thoroughly legalistic.
Despite the awkward tentativeness of the EEAS report’s conclusion that “there are indications that Israel would be in breach of its human rights obligations under Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement,” along with the EUSR report’s assertion that “[This] paper does not include any value judgment by the EUSR or the EU,” the reports are breathtakingly unfair to Israel. They display a remarkable credulity concerning Hamas’ claims regarding Israeli responsibility for civilian suffering, and they ignore Israel’s perspective completely. Both reports rely solely on UN institutions that have a long and sordid history of anti-Israel bias.
One of many problems is that the EEAS/EUSR reports focus almost solely on Israel. The pretext for this seems reasonable at first glance: the reports’ purpose is to help EU foreign ministers assess Israel’s compliance with the EU-Israel Association Agreement. But the drafters’ apparent belief that Israeli actions can be assessed in a vacuum is sorely mistaken. More than that, the lack of context leaves a strong impression that the EEAS and the EUSR, even as the EUSR boasts that the EU is the “most vocal and committed global advocate of the rule-based [sic] international order,” don’t care terribly much about the brutal and unprovoked violence that Israel’s enemies perpetrated and the dire existential threat they pose to the Jewish state.
It is almost as if the EEAS/EUSR see the Israelis as the only autonomous actors in this drama. The paucity of content on Hamas, the PA, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran implies that they are all passive victims, largely incapable of acting in the face of Israel’s overwhelming ferocity and thus not truly responsible for their savagery. Ultimately, one is tempted to wonder whether the EEAS/EUSR believe that Israel somehow deserves what it gets—that terrorist violence against innocent people is an understandable reaction to imagined Israeli oppression.
The most egregious example of this is the very first paragraph of the EUSR report’s opening summary. Setting the scene for the entire report, it actually manages to imply that Israel is at fault for Hamas’s acts of heinous brutality on October 7, 2023:
Prior to 7 October 2023 attacks, [sic] the situation in the West Bank was grave and extremely volatile, with record high numbers of incidents and violations. In Gaza, the humanitarian situation has been serious for years, due to Israel’s closure of the Strip, which has been affecting all areas of life. Since 7 October 2023 attacks [sic] and the ensuing escalation of hostilities, the situation has drastically deteriorated throughout the OPT, all the more so in war-torn Gaza.”
Of course, there is no mention of the fact that the suffering in the “OPT”—the “Occupied Palestinian Territory”—is due to a war for which only Hamas and its allies are at fault, and to Israel’s need to protect its population from Hamas and the other violent actors in both Gaza and the West Bank, who hide among civilians.
Following that ludicrous opening, the EUSR report contains 133 numbered points describing how, according to the EUSR, the parties to the conflict have or may have violated international law. Nine of those points allege IHRL/IHL violations against neither party, neither Israel nor its enemies. Only eight points allege violations of IHRL/IHL by Hamas. Seven of those appear in a small section on the events of October 7. Two points are against Hezbollah, in a section on Lebanon.
Twenty points are nominally directed against both sides, but they are almost all heavily weighted against Israel. The remaining points—92 of them—are directed solely against Israel. That means that 112 points out of 133, or 84 percent, are directed against Israel. It is as if the EEAS/EUSR are resolved to portray everything Israel has done since October 7—the most brutal (and fully unprovoked) attack against Jews since the Holocaust—as a war crime.
Some particularly astounding examples deserve mentioning.
Point 54 of the EUSR report actually manages to condemn Israel’s freeing of hostages more forcefully than Hamas’s taking and retaining of hostages:
In June 2024, following Israeli forces’ hostage freeing operation in An Nuseirat, which secured the release of 4 hostages while killing and injuring hundreds of Palestinians, many of them civilians, OHCHR [the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights] reiterated that the operation conducted in a densely populated area seriously called into question ISF’s [Israeli Security Forces] respect for the IHL principles of distinction, proportionality and precautions. OHCHR noted that armed groups holding hostages in such densely populated areas were putting the lives of Palestinian civilians and the hostages at heightened risk. All these actions may amount to war crimes.”
Similarly, the two sections entitled “Detention,” points 66-68 and 91-94, accuse Israel of “routine use of administrative detention in Gaza,” cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of detained Palestinians, possible “collective punishment,” which is a war crime, and possible torture and mistreatment of detainees. No attempt is made to explain or examine the Israeli claim that detentions occur only if they are necessary in response to imminent security threats to its citizens. Not a word is wasted on the fact that Israel investigates allegations of abuse and cruel treatment of detainees. Even worse, points 66-68 and 91-94 pass over in complete silence Hamas’s hostage-taking of innocent Israelis.
The EUSR report also contains a section commenting on “the right of self-defence vs. reprisals,” which implies that Israel has no right to self-defense in Gaza. The argument goes like this: because Israel exercises effective control of Gaza, it is a violation of international law to defend itself within that territory—acts carried out in the interest of self-defense in Gaza constitute “reprisals” and not legitimate self-defense:
Israel has the right and indeed the duty to protect its population but, in doing so, it must act in compliance with international law…the ICJ [the UN’s International Court of Justice] found that Israel could not rely on the right to self-defence in the case of armed attack originating from a territory it controls, i.e. the OPT, including Gaza.”
Just as the above points accuse Israel of violating international law in freeing hostages and defending itself, point 44 performs a similar legerdemain regarding Hamas’s use of the Palestinian civilian population as human shields. To be sure, the EUSR dutifully reports the OHCHR’s acknowledgement that Hamas is committing a war crime in using human shields. However, the EUSR then goes on to agree with the OHCHR’s de facto assertion that Hamas’s use of human shields succeeds brilliantly in exactly the way Hamas desires: it ties Israel’s hands by transforming Israel’s attempts to defeat Hamas into war crimes: “The use of human shields,” OHCHR stressed, “would not, however, justify indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks by Israeli security forces.” If this is what the EU thinks, why should Hamas stop using civilians as human shields?
All in all, the EEAS/EUSR reports make clear that they share, whether wittingly or unwittingly, Hamas’s objective of rendering it impossible for Israel to defend itself. If Israel were to comply with the ludicrous interpretation of IHRL/IHL propagated by the EEAS/EUSR and their UN sources, it would be at the mercy of its Islamist enemies.
A final point: the EEAS/EUSR reports, replete with reminders that Israel is “bound by its obligations under IHRL and IHL” and full of requests, demands, and “orders” from the UN for Israel to change its tactics, contain literally nothing urging Hamas or its allied groups to do anything different from what they are doing. Why not urge Hamas to stop using Gazan civilians as human shields? To stop fighting in civilian areas? To stop using hospitals and mosques as hideouts for fighters and weapons depots? To release the remaining hostages? To stop stealing as much as it can of the mountains of food aid to Gaza that Israel has facilitated? To stop threatening, even shooting, Gazans who try to flee after Israel forewarns the civilian population of an imminent attack? Indeed, why not urge Hamas to surrender and thereby stop the war it started? It is as if Hamas bears no responsibility for the dire IHRL/IHL violations it has committed and the immense suffering and death it has caused.
The EEAS and EUSR admit that they have “no dedicated capacity to assess the situation on the ground” and that they therefore “[rely] entirely on assessments made by independent international institutions.” The institutions highlighted are the International Court of Justice of the UN (ICJ), the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflicts (SRSG CAAC), and other UN bodies such as the Hamas-infested UN Refugee and Works Agency (UNRWA).
Despite the EUSR’s insistence that these “independent international institutions” are “legitimate, independent and impartial bodies,” they all have a long and sordid history of anti-Israel bias. The reports themselves prove this all over again. They make frequent references to and liberally quote from various statements and decisions of these bodies that seek to demonize Israel and soft-pedal the brutality of Hamas and Israel’s other enemies.
Surely the EEAS/EUSR know of the UN’s notorious anti-Israel bias. Why do they ignore it? Why do these reports seem to take it for granted that UN institutions are not only credible, but the most authoritative of all possible sources, simply because they are from the UN? Here it is important to keep in mind the fact that this is a report of EU officials to foreign ministers acting in their capacity as EU officials. The UN worship exemplified in these reports is part and parcel of the EU’s reason for being—the advancement of peace and human rights through supranationalism, at the expense of national sovereignty and democratic accountability. The report itself puts it this way: “The European Union’s commitment to effective multilateralism, with the UN at its core, is a central element of the EU’s external policy, while a principled defence of human rights and the rule of law in EU foreign policy is enshrined in EU treaties.”
While relying on the UN to make Israel look as bad as possible, the reports ignore the plentiful information that is readily available from other sources that are more reliable and authoritative than the UN. To name just one example, it was apparently too much trouble for the drafters of the reports to consult the abundance of information Israel has made available, on the website of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and elsewhere, that clearly and convincingly refutes every allegation that the UN and others have made against it, and indeed that the EU reports gullibly repeat.
Here’s perhaps the ultimate irony: the EEAS/EUSR reports, with their focus on international human rights law, seek to underscore that the EU truly is the world’s greatest advocate for and defender of international law and of human rights. But the reports end up giving the lie to that claim by failing to notice or acknowledge Israel’s staunch fidelity to IHRL/IHL under exceedingly difficult circumstances. A quick perusal of what Israel has disseminated reveals unequivocally that Israel is not ignoring international law. Just the opposite: it is meticulously following international law. (See, for example, the “Key Legal Aspects” paper to be found on the Israeli Foreign Ministry website).
The unavoidable conclusion is that the EUSR and EEAS are taking sides. With willful, almost defiant, blindness to reality, they are effectively siding with Hamas. They believe the lies of terrorists, as propagated by their sympathizers in the UN, and ignore the numerous, clear, and credible Israeli communications that have set the record straight.
This invites the question: How is this possible?
Benjamin Netanyahu, the very man whom the EU loves to hate, hits the mark. He constantly stresses the necessity of moral clarity, of knowing the difference between good and evil, to understanding what is happening in this war.
As he put it in his July 25, 2024, address to the U.S. Congress:
Defeating our brutal enemies requires both courage and clarity. Clarity begins by knowing the difference between good and evil. Yet incredibly many anti-Israel protesters, many choose to stand with evil. They stand with Hamas. They stand with rapists and murderers. …
They refuse to make the simple distinction between those who target terrorists and those who target civilians, between the democratic State of Israel and the terrorist thugs of Hamas.”
To be clear, Netanyahu is referring here not to the EU, but to the anti-Israel protesters who have taken to the streets. Nevertheless, Netanyahu’s message also applies to Israel’s many supposed allies in Europe and elsewhere who don’t seem to want to grasp the reality of the situation. I believe that the most charitable explanation of what lies behind the disastrous EEAS/EUSR reports is a morally incoherent refusal to make a “simple distinction between those who target terrorists and those who target civilians.”
The EEAS and EUSR reports exemplify the desire, ubiquitous among EU elites, to practice evenhandedness at all costs, to avoid the presumed intolerance of judging one side by judging both sides. But this desire is profoundly misplaced when judging murderers, rapists, and kidnappers alongside Israelis who are defending themselves with determination and decency—and with as much care as possible for civilians.
The moral incoherence these reports display is a logical consequence of European elites’ jettisoning of the Judeo-Christian moral system that birthed and has sustained Western civilization until now.
The EU elites have largely replaced Judeo-Christian moral categories with political categories. To be good is no longer to do the right thing but, above all, to believe the right thing—to have the correct political views. Good people are those who support the EU and its utopian vision of peace via supranational governance and international law, people who do not question the moral authority that the United Nations attributes to itself, and who believe that the purported sins of the West (including Israel)—colonialism, imperialism, prosperity, and economic success—mandate a predisposition favoring non-Westerners in their ongoing struggle to right the wrongs of Western domination.
And here we come to the deeper question I mentioned above: there is a more fundamental issue at stake. Our so-called shared Western values seem to be drowning under a worldview clash so sharp, stark, and consequential as to constitute a complete and unbridgeable break.
Is the West falling apart? It certainly will if the moral incoherence illustrated in the EU reports succeeds in fully displacing the Judeo-Christian heritage that made the West what it is.
The way that the EEAS/EUSR reports skew reality merely underscores that we interpret reality through a moral framework. If we lose sight of morality, we lose sight of reality. That’s the fundamental reason why the reality Israel and its supporters see and the reality that many in the EU see are so diametrically different.
Let me conclude with a ray of hope, however thin: As of this writing, it appears possible that a ceasefire agreement that could lead to the end of this war might be within reach. This could mean the de facto acceptance of Israel’s victory and the effective defeat of Iran, Hamas, and Iran’s other proxies. Over time, it could mean real peace in the Middle East. Could such a development help the EU come to its senses, or at least modify its default anti-Israel stance? Never say never.
