“Stop double standards”: the Five Star Movement’s call to suspend the EU-Israel agreement

Brussels – “In today’s world, where war has become the norm, does international law still hold any value if it is applied selectively?” This is the question and the warning raised by the MEP for the Five Star Movement, Carolina Morace (The Left), at a press briefing on the sidelines of the European Parliament initiative “Building Peace in a World at War”, where the book by the former Italian ambassador to Belgium, Elena Basile, entitled
Approdo per noi naufraghi. Come costruire la pace (A Haven for Us Shipwrecked. How to build peace), published by Paper First. The event was accompanied by a protest by the M5S delegation to the European Parliament calling for the immediate suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement: a call that comes at the very moment the EU Foreign Affairs Council is meeting in Luxembourg.

“On the one hand, international institutions are funding wars; on the other, we have citizens calling for consistency,” Morace thunders, contrasting the institutional inaction in response to a call from over a million European citizens to halt the agreement with Israel with the “ease” with which the EU approved a €90 billion loan for Ukraine: “We cannot apply pressure and treat the rule of law as a switch to be flipped according to our interests. And a glaring example of this is the acclaim for the European Union’s €90 billion loan to Ukraine,” continues the MEP. “Of these 90 billion, we know full well that 60 will certainly not go towards welfare or the country’s reconstruction, but into the coffers of the arms industry and, above all, the United States.” 

Our colleague Danilo Della Valle (Five Star Movement, The Left) goes on to highlight the EU’s “double standards”, describing the failure to suspend the agreement as “beyond comment” and, in particular, Italy’s position that the conditions for a break are not in place. “We have witnessed the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, a full-blown genocide that continues. In fact, we have witnessed Israel’s violations of international law through the bombing of sovereign states and the attempted occupation of southern Lebanon. When will that moment come?” asks the MEP, just before mentioning the fact that, unlike in the Russian case, Europe has failed to approve even a single package of sanctions against Tel Aviv. 

According to former ambassador Basile, “today we should all agree that either we choose to support this entrenched West that responds with wars, or we seek mediation with the Global South.” In this context, “this book launches a discussion on certain international issues which, in my view, are of the utmost importance so that dissent and the forces already present within the most receptive institutions can consider an alternative political framework to a Western world, to a financial capital currently in crisis,” she explains. Finally, in highlighting the urgency of terminating the agreement with Israel, Basile emphasises that suspension is a due act: “Granting Israel preferential access to the European market effectively means continuing to bolster an economy that supports the genocide in Gaza, whilst fuelling systematic human rights violations in the West Bank and military aggression in Lebanon.”