It is heartening to note that the European Union has taken a meaningful step against Israel’s growing belligerence in the Gaza Strip by asking it to end its military operation in Gaza’s Rafah “immediately,” warning that failure to do so would undermine ties with the bloc.

“Should Israel continue its military operation in Rafah, it would inevitably put a heavy strain on the EU’s relationship with Israel,” has said the statement issued in the EU’s name by its foreign policy chief Josep Borrell.

No doubt, the EU has decided to act firmly to help stop the Israeli aggression in the Gaza Strip where the armed forces of the Zionist state have killed more than 35,000 people, mostly civilians.

The bloc seems to have realized that reining in Israel is a matter of conscience - it’s a moral issue, not a political one. Unfortunately, however, the Biden administration’s conduct is strongly characterized by hypocrisy because the US pause on a single shipment of deadly ordnance to Israel has so far been very weak expression of world’s lone superpower’s purported disquiet.

That the US is working hand in glove with Israel is a fact that has found its best expression from the fact that the Israelis, according to Simon Speakman Cordall, a noted Tunisia-based journalist, “seem to be doing things more slowly, and with less reliance on massive weaponry, but the outcome is the same”.

To conclude, I would request the EU leadership to walk the talk; it must exert pressure on the Biden administration to come out clean without any further loss of time.

Himmat Baig (Karachi)

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024