Two wars that fracture Europe

For the first time in two years, the war in Ukraine did not top the agenda of the last European Council. It was another war, the one between Israel and Hamas, that occupied the main concerns of the heads of state and government of the EU-27, who were unable to reach unanimity on these two major challenges, the final outcome of which will clearly have brought about a new order, or at least a significant part of it.  

At the same time that the hard core of the war cabinet - Prime Minister Netanyahu and his ministers Galant and Gantz - appeared in Israel to show unwavering unity, in Brussels discrepancies and nuances abounded. "Israel is waging the war of all humanity', Netanyahu stated bluntly, adding that 'if Israel does not win it, our allies will soon know that they will be next [to fall]'.  

EU leaders could only agree to call for the establishment of humanitarian corridors in Gaza and to call for "pauses for humanitarian needs", a minimum consensus formula accompanied by the desire to rapidly organise an "international peace conference".  

However, it does not appear that the EU today has the strength and influence to ensure that both objectives are immediately achieved. The Israeli government claims that it is 'waging its second war of independence' while pointing out that calls for pauses or truces, 'inspired in one way or another by Hamas, do not seek humanitarian solutions but to relieve the pressure of the war on themselves'.  

With its selective bombing of targets in Syria and Iraq, the US has also entered directly into this war, in which all actors are clamouring not to overstep the narrow boundaries of Gaza. Reality belies this. Attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinian farmers in the West Bank, as well as Jewish military operations on suspected Hamas members, also in the occupied West Bank, indicate that the war has now spread to all Palestinian territories. Lebanon is likely to be a prime Israeli target if Hizbollah attacks on Israeli territory continue, as the UN peacekeeping force seems unable to prevent them.  

On the other hand, the targets bombed by the US in Syria and Iraq were intended to nip in the bud the attacks allegedly planned by Islamic organisations supported and financed by Iran, all of which, whether one likes it or not, redraws the antagonism between the West and the Arab world that was supposed to have been blurred. The latter, moreover, is also once again implicated as a whole by the renewed propaganda of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which calls for its unconditional realignment with the Palestinian people, claiming, in the case of Hamas, to be its sole representative.  

In this complicated and infernal chessboard, there has also been an important coincidence in Moscow: that of a Hamas delegation with Iran's deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani. The Kremlin has been quick to deny that they were received by President Vladimir Putin himself, but it does not take much insight to deduce that the Russian officials who did greet them were merely showing them the first snowflakes falling on the Russian capital.  

Returning to the European Council, its members were able to see and hear Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenski on video in Brussels, who once again called for no let-up in the attention and aid given to his aggrieved country. In addition to Viktor Orban's fractious Hungary, Robert Fico's Slovakia has already rejected this call. Russia hopes to insist on deepening the fractures that are already becoming more evident within the EU. To this end, it will not hesitate to push its anti-Western propaganda in the Muslim world and the new Global South.  

Faced with such challenges, the EU has no alternative but to also set itself up as a war cabinet, i.e. to clearly define the objectives to be achieved, the first of which remains that Ukraine should not lose the war to the Russian invader; to eliminate or at least put aside disagreements; and to immediately and unceremoniously define a common policy on the immigration already underway, which will no doubt multiply in the medium term; and to prepare itself to face the destabilisation that will afflict the entire Sahel strip even more. In other words, let's put an end to the metalanguage and call a spade a spade. For example, Europe is not and does not live in an oasis of peace. It is facing two wars, even if for the moment they only apparently and tangentially touch its territory.