Barry Rubin observes in regard to Israeli relations with Europe:
Probably they are better than at any time since the early 1980s. With the end of the Palestinian intifada in 2003, Israelis withdrawal from and the Hamas takeover of the Gaza Strip, some European experience with radical Islamist terror, and the growing threat from Iran’s nuclear drive, the situation has shifted. Today, the governments of the four main European countries–France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom–are all quite friendly toward Israel, the first three especially so.
Especially noteworthy is the fact that the readiness to isolate Hamas politically has not eroded, helped no doubt by Hamas’s own explicit intransigence. Nor has there been a political rapprochement with Hizballah or Syria. At the same time, European states have participated in raising higher levels of sanctions against Iran and expressed strong opposition to Tehran’s nuclear project. Criticism of Israel has declined while pressure is almost non-existent.
In France, the antagonistic regime of President Jacques Chirac has been replaced by the warmth of President Nicholas Sarkozy. With Germany’s Angela Merkel and given the results of the Italian elections, in which Silvio Berlusconi returned to power, the same is true. The transition from Prime Minister Tony Blair to Gordon Brown in Britain has maintained a good relationship.
Similarly, David Hazony notes:
But leaving all that aside, one wonders whether the damage to Israel’s relations with Europe is real at all. Over the last decade, European governments have largely shifted towards far greater support for Israel. The willingness of countries like Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, and Germany to boycott Durban II, alongside the most pro-Israel government France has had since the early 1960s, and the overtly friendly government in the Czech Republic, reflects a Europe that is the most heavily supportive of Israel in a very long time. Part of this may have something to do with Israel’s pulling out of Gaza in 2005, which made it politically easier for European leaders to soften their stances. But there are alternate explanations as well: the combination of 8 years of unflinching American solidarity with Israel, an increasing European awareness that its true enemies are the same Islamic extremists that Israel is fighting, and the actual rise of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the prospect of a nuclear Iran — all these have made a great many Europeans understand that pressuring Israel may hurt Europeans in the long run more than alienating the sources of their oil. If Europe once managed to present a united front in support of Israel’s concessions to the Palestinians, today Europe seems utterly divided.
And that’s despite FM Avigdor Lieberman!
However, Daniel Pipes writes that on a grassroots level, Israel’s generally more popular in the East than in the West.
I wonder if the change in Europe is somehow also the result of one of the Bush administration’s efforts. In an article called the Frequent Abstainers Club, Jerusalem Post columnist Evelyn Gordon explained this approach. Since the article is no longer extant, I quote it here.
Bush achieved this shift by setting a clear, consistent standard for what constitutes bias: Condemnations of Israel are biased unless the resolution also condemns anti-Israel terror.
And, more importantly, vague condemnations of “all violence against civilians” do not qualify. The resolution must explicitly condemn Palestinian perpetrators such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Aksa Martyrs Brigades.
That is such a simple and reasonable demand that some countries have found it impossible to ignore. Yet the Palestinians, and hence the Arab countries that sponsor Security Council resolutions on their behalf, have never once been willing to agree.
The result is that a handful of nations that once voted consistently against Israel – England, Germany, Norway, Romania, Bulgaria and Cameroon – turned into frequent abstainers.
John Danforth, Washington’s current ambassador to the UN, provided an eloquent example of how the new system works during last week’s debate on the latest anti-Israel resolution, which would have condemned Israel’s current military operation in Gaza and demanded that it cease immediately.
Danforth did not say that the US was unwilling in principle to condemn the operation, which began after Hamas killed two Israeli children in Sderot with a Kassam rocket launched from Gaza on September 29. That would have been unacceptable to every other Security Council member, and therefore counterproductive. Instead he explained in detail why the resolution was unbalanced as it stood and what would have to be added to make it acceptable to the US.
The resolution, he said in addresses to the council on Monday and Tuesday, “tends to put the blame on Israel and absolves terrorists in the Middle East – people who shoot rockets into civilian areas, people who are responsible for killing children, Hamas. Nothing was said in this resolution about that problem.”
Specifically, he said, “it does not mention even one of the 450 Kassam rocket attacks launched against Israel over the past two years It does not mention the two Israeli children who were outside playing last week when a rocket suddenly crashed into their young bodies.
At the time Gordon noticed that more and more Western countries were following the lead of the United States. Once the United States with its veto made the resolutions inoperative on a consistent basis, Western diplomats were more inclined to go along with the American veto. If the Bush administration’s principled insistence on even-handedness may have had a long term effect of changing European minds. Too often it’s forgotten that diplomacy is a long term, not a short term effort.
In a related issue, the Czech Republic expelled David Duke and its outgoing Prime Minister declared that the EU underestimates the Iranian threat.
The question of Iran was a subject on which Topolanek and his Israeli interlocutors, Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, found they had a common language.
“The rhetoric of the Israeli officials is understandable” on the issue of Iran, Topolanek said, making reference to the speeches of Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres during Holocaust Memorial Day last week.
“I believe that at this very moment, there is no imminent threat of a war between Israel and Iran,” the Czech continued. “But the fact that Iran is a threat whose danger can be magnified if the country will have a nuclear weapon – that is something the entire world knows about. The fact that the EU is somewhat underestimating this threat is also true. Nevertheless all of us are looking at this twin track approach toward Iran. I think that there is still time for hard power against Iran, but only after all soft- power means have been already used. At this moment I see an Israeli attack against Iran as very improbable.”
(On other issues the Czech Prime Minister doesn’t necessarily agree with Israel but he doesn’t seem confrontational about those disagreements.)
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
Cameroon?