“Nobody is going to listen to us ever again when we go around telling others to respect human rights and international law”: the EU’s former head gardener chief diplomat, Josep Borrell.
After 659 days of gradually intensifying genocide in Gaza, live-streamed around the world every minute of every day, depressingly few countries have taken anything approaching meaningful action against the country directly perpetrating the genocide. Almost all of them are in the so-called “Global South”. They include Colombia whose Gustavo Petro government was one of the first to break off diplomatic ties with Israel, in May 2024.
As we noted at the time, the move was not without its share of risks, given: a) Colombia is one of Washington’s longest standing vassal states in Latin America and is home to at least seven US military bases; and b) the historic role Israel has played not only arming Colombia’s security forces but also in training its paramilitary groups, which killed more citizens than the guerrillas in the decades-long Civil War, according to Colombia’s Truth Commission.
The Petro government’s next move was to become one of the first — and only — national governments to try to impose economic sanctions against Israel in response to its war crimes in Gaza. Not only did it suspend all purchases of Israeli weaponry, it also blocked all sales of Colombian coal to Israel.
“Colombian coal is used to manufacture bombs that kill Palestinian children,” Petro said to justify the move, which was not without its critics at home.
Corporate Sanction Busters
That was on August 14, 2024. Yet according to recent reports, Colombian coal continues to flow from El Cerrejón, a huge open air mine in northern Colombia, to Israel. In an address before Congress to mark the 215th anniversary of Colombia’s independence last Sunday, Petro accused two global mining companies — Swiss-based Glencore and Birmingham, Alabama-based Drummond — of continuing to export Colombian coal to Israel despite the export ban.
Petro insists that officials in his own government, including the former minister of industry and commerce, Luis Carlos Reyes, contravened his presidential decree. For his part, Reyes claims that Petro knew all along that the decree was rife with loopholes that would give foreign companies sufficient wriggle room to continue sending Colombian coal to Israel, and is now using Reyes as a fall guy.
For the moment, it is hard to know who is telling the truth. The best case scenario, I suppose, is that Petro is being played and not doing the playing. One thing that is clear is that the shipments of coal have continued despite the export ban, albeit in somewhat lower volumes. According to Colombia’s National Mining Association, “since the export ban came into effect, sales of Colombian coal have fallen from 250,000 to 100,000 tons per month.”
This more or less coincides with the testimony of Igor Díaz, a representative of the Sintracarbón mining union who told El País that at least three ships have set sail from Colombia without authorisation, one belonging to Glencore and two to Drummond.
Last Thursday, Petro ordered the Colombian Navy to stop any ships sailing from any Colombian port with coal to Israel. He also called on the Wayuu indigenous authorities along Colombia’s Caribbean coastline and other peoples affected by coal exploitation to block all mining activity at the El Cerrejón, one of the world’s largest open-air mines, if shipments of coal continue to leave for Israel.
“I have ordered that not a single ton of coal will be sent to Israel,” Petro said. “Colombia will not be complicit in genocide.”
A Corporate-Sponsored Genocide
The same cannot be said of Glencore and Drummond. Both are among 60 companies featured in the report, “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide”, published by the United Nation’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese.
Albanese argues that western companies have been under a legal and moral obligation to break ties with Israel’s system of occupation since last summer when the ICJ ruled that Israel’s decades-old occupation was a criminal enterprise based on apartheid and forcible transfer.
As the British journalist and author Jonathan Cook reports in his article, “Israel’s Genocide Is Big Business – and the Face of the Future“, many of the foreign companies operating in Israel have responded to the allegations by claiming that “this was Israel’s responsibility, not theirs, or that it was for states, not international law, to regulate their business activities.”
The dozens of high-profile businesses identified in Albanese’s report represent an array of sectors, from tech (Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, and IBM, again supporting genocide, this time by providing Israel with biometric databases) to automotive (Volvo, Hyundai), to energy (BP, Chevron), finance (Barclays, BNP Paribas) and mining (Glencore, Drummond). As Cook notes, they are all profiting from Israel’s crimes in Gaza:
In an interview with US journalist Chris Hedges, Albanese, an expert in international law, concluded: “The genocide in Gaza has not stopped, because it is lucrative. It’s profitable for far too many.”
Albanese lists dozens of major western companies that are deeply invested in Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people.
This is not a new development, as she notes. These firms have exploited business opportunities associated with Israel’s violent occupation of the Palestinian people’s lands for years, and in some cases decades.
The switch from Israel’s occupation of Gaza to its current genocide hasn’t threatened profits; it has enhanced them. Or as Albanese puts it: “The profits have increased as the economy of the occupation transformed into an economy of genocide.”
The special rapporteur has been a growing thorn in the side of Israel and its western sponsors over the past 21 months of slaughter in Gaza.
That explains why Marco Rubio, Trump’s secretary of state, announced soon after her report was issued that he was imposing sanctions on Albanese for her efforts to shed light on the crimes of Israeli and US officials.
Revealingly, he called her statements – rooted in international law – “economic warfare against the United States and Israel”. Albanese and the UN system of universal human rights that stands behind her, it seems, represent a threat to western profiteering.
13 Countries Take On Israel
Albanese was recently in Bogotá to attend a gathering with representatives of more than 30 states seeking to develop an emergency plan for stopping Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza and the West Bank. The meeting was convened by the “Hague Group”, a bloc of nations co-founded in January by officials from several countries in the Global South, including South Africa and Colombia. The group aims to ensure compliance with the sentences handed down against Israel by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
In her speech Albanese called on all States to suspend their ties with Israel:
The occupied Palestinian territory is now a living hell. In Gaza, Israel has dismantled even the UN’s last function – humanitarian aid – in order to starve, repeatedly displace, or deliberately murder a population it has marked for elimination. In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, ethnic cleansing is proceeding through illegal siege, mass displacement, extrajudicial executions, arbitrary arrests and widespread torture. In all areas under Israeli rule, Palestinians live under the terror of annihilation, broadcast in real time to a watching world.
The Hague Group has two chairs — Colombia and South Africa — and six members: Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia and Senegal. But the Bogota conference drew delegates from 32 nations, including China, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Turkey, Egypt and Qatar.
The only Collective West countries in attendance were Spain, Ireland, Slovenia. None of them featured among the 13 States (Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Nicaragua, Oman, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, South Africa, and Türkiye) that ratified measures aimed at blocking the transfer of weapons and other military equipment to Israel through their respective territories and upholding universal jurisdiction mandates in order to ensure justice for victims of Israel’s crimes in Palestine.
Admittedly, 13 countries out of 193 is a pathetically small number given the breathtaking array and gravity of war crimes Israel has committed in Gaza — including the worst of all, genocide — over the past 659 days. But it is something.
Of course, these 13 (mostly smallish) countries will have their work cut out preventing Israel from sourcing weapons for its ongoing genocide in Gaza and expansionary wars in the Middle East. As Colombia’s recent experience shows, it’s one thing to try to impose sanctions on Israel; it’s a whole other thing to enforce them.
But at least the intention is there and more countries may sign on. The Houthis have certainly made their stand. Grassroots resistance is also on the rise as port workers in Europe refuse to service ships bound for Israel while in Greece citizens bar the disembarkation of Israeli tourists. As Yves pointed out a few days ago, Israel is increasingly subject to a death of a thousand cuts.
Yet to my knowledge, not a single collective West nation has taken any action to prevent the provision or transfer of arms to, or the purchase of arms from, Israel. Ireland, to its credit, did recently become the first EU country to ban trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. And the EU has placed certain sanctions on individuals and business entities connected to Israel’s illegal settlements.
Spain’s Pedro Sánchez government has talked a good game, even going so far as to recognise Palestinian statehood late last year. It also participated in the conference organised by the Hague Group, for which it faced criticism in parts of the Spanish press, mainly for participating in a forum alongside “some of the worst dictatorships on earth – such as those of Cuba and Nicaragua” — and in which none of the “great democracies” of the West participated, as if that were proof of the event’s irrelevance rather than the West’s moral bankruptcy.
Yet Spain was also the biggest buyer of Israeli arms and ammunition from February to May, accounting for 78% of all EU purchases. As EC Saharawi notes, “despite global calls [for countries] to cut ties with Israel’s military industry, more than 50% of Israel’s military exports went to Europe. In other words, while the violence is publicly condemned, the machinery behind it is still being financed.”
In the interest of balance, it’s not just Western states that are guilty of inaction or complicity. The leaders of most Arab countries have vociferously condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza while at the same maintaining close ties with the state of Israel.
Despite positioning themselves as leading defenders of the Global South, neither Russia nor China have cut their diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv or imposed economic sanctions against Israel. Indeed, Beijing recently sought to strengthen its economic ties with Tel Aviv while Chinese companies and workers are allegedly helping to sustain Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Even in times of genocide, business is business.
Of course, no one bears as much responsibility for aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide as the US, regardless of who is in the White House. But even in the US Israel is rapidly losing support as the stark reality of genocide becomes undeniable.
Back in Europe, the governments of France and the UK have issued stronger statements of late, including occasional mutterings about recognising Palestine (now that Israel is systematically destroying it). But it amounts to little more than legal ass-covering. Unlike the US and Israel, most Western European countries — including Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy and Spain — are signatories to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, or ICC.
In the case of the UK, the government and armed forces continue to provide military, logistic and intelligence support for Israel’s actions in Gaza even as the public outcry grows. Like many other European states, it is intensifying its legal crackdown on supporters of Palestine. Former Labour MP Zarah Sultana recently accused the UK Premier Keir Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, of war crimes.
The “appalling scenes in Gaza” have been enabled by the arms, surveillance & diplomatic cover Keir Starmer’s Labour government have provided to a genocidal apartheid state.
He still refuses to call it a genocide because he is complicit in it.
Keir Starmer belongs in The Hague. https://t.co/hHQrbtT30m
— Zarah Sultana MP (@zarahsultana) July 25, 2025
EU “Loses Its Soul in Gaza”
The EU, meanwhile, is apparently “assessing its options” after finding Israel in breach of human rights obligations under an association agreement between the bloc and Israel. EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, one of Europe’s biggest cheerleaders for Israel’s bloodbath in Gaza, claims to have finally found a conscience.
“Civilians cannot be targets,” VDL says. The Gazans “have suffered too much, for too long.”
“So little, so late”, says Albanese.
So little, so late, President @vonderleyen :
After you have given Israel 21 months a free pass in Gaza, it will take more than words to prevent Israel from completing its genocidal mission and overt ethnic cleansing campaign. And even more, to repair what's left of the EU… https://t.co/uvdpPQ1rdy— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) July 22, 2025
EU foreign ministers are reportedly scheduled to discuss potential consequences during a meeting next month while hundreds of thousands of Gazans face starvation in the days and weeks ahead. The resulting damage to Europe’s already weakened standing in the word is likely to be brutal, warns Albanese:
As a European, I fear what the region and its institutions have come to symbolize for many: a brotherhood of states that preach international law, but are guided more by a colonial mentality than by principle, acting as vassals of the United States empire, even as it drags us from war to war, from misery to misery, and, as far as Palestine is concerned, from silence to complicity.
That complicity is likely to continue, if not intensify in the coming months, given that the EU just prostrated itself before the US by signing one of the most one-sided trade deals in modern history. VdL, once dubbed by Politico as “Europe’s most American president”, has over-delivered for Washington once again.
If Europeans were paying attention (or being told the truth), they should be beyond appalled by this "deal": https://t.co/NlD6qhVu0V
It's nothing more than one of the most expensive imperial tributes in history. Just a massive one-way transfer of wealth with no reciprocal…
— Arnaud Bertrand (@RnaudBertrand) July 27, 2025
Even former senior Eurocrats are beginning to lament Brussels’ loss of power and influence on the global stage. The bloc’s former chief diplomat/head gardener, Josep Borrell, said in a recent interview with Spain’s Canal SER that Europe has lost its soul in Gaza. The interviewer then asks, rather bizarrely, “what else has Europe lost?”, to which Borrell responds, “You don’t think losing your soul is enough?” He then says:
To lose respect. To lose the capacity to talk about human rights. Nobody is going to listen to us ever again when we go around telling others to respect human rights and international law.
As a committed Europhile and as a European citizen, it causes me great sadness to see Europe’s reaction to [what is happening in Gaza]. I don’t understand how there are still countries… sending weapons to Israel so that it can continue killing thousands of children in Gaza.
Now, it’s not so much about the bombs being dropped, it’s about — as one Israeli minister put it — not letting a single grain of wheat into Gaza. There are 6,000 trucks — and I have seen them — loaded with food waiting to enter Gaza, and on the other side there are two million people starving to death.
Borrell laments the EU’s inevitable loss of influence on the global stage while most countries will probably breathe a long sigh of relief. He also speaks like somebody who was powerless to affect EU policy towards Israel despite the fact he was High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy during the first 400 or so days of Israel’s “Gazacide”.
As we have been asking since Jan 2024, why are so few countries willing to take action against Israel? The possibilities are myriad — the power of Israeli lobbies in the US and Europe, pressure from Washington, Israel’s strategic role as colonial attack dog in the Middle East, the wide reach of NSO’s Pegasus software and the blackmailing of lawmakers through honeytraps like Epstein’s — but one seems to overshadow all the others: Israel’s vital importance to the war and surveillance industry.
As Cook writes, “Israel – the world’s biggest incubator for the arms and surveillance industries – is simply too big and too important to be allowed to fail. Even as it commits genocide”.
The same companies that were scurrying for the exits in Russia are now tying themselves into pretzels trying to justify why they should continue doing business with the genocidal Zionist State of Israel. It’s been revealing watching who in the world is willing to put either legal and diplomatic resources (South Africa, Colombia) or missiles and drones (Yemen, supplied by Iran) behind their moral convictions while the Arab monarchies issue perfunctory “strongly worded” condemnations, and the west fritters away political capital and banishes itself to the fringes of the moral universe.
Israel is proving the single point of (moral) failure for the western system. The Arabs will continue gouging themselves on the luxuries afforded to them by the money gushing out of the ground on their lands while shoveling some of that loot into the cap tables of Israeli tech companies, but we all see them now. It’s the smallish countries of the world who are leading the charge against the most consequential moral issue of our time while the “advanced” countries are enabling the horror show while hiding behind tepid official statements registering their “concern at the horrific situation in Gaza”.
Pretty sure that the days of the Collective West lecturing and finger-wagging the countries of the Global Majority have just about come to an end. After not only tolerating the Israeli genocide but helping enable it for financial gain, I expect that more and more countries will go on the attack if lectured by them. You can see the effects already when the EU found that not only had they made both China and Russia enemies, but that they had no friends in the Global Majority to help back them up against Trump’s demands.
Patrick Bond reports that South Africa continues export coal to israel. IIRC, Ramaphosa’s brother was involved with the trade. The problem is, of course, multinationals taking assets of countries like Colombia and SA without regard to legal or moral obligations.
If EU ever had a soul, it was already lost on its own continent (i.e. the Balkans, and the Ukraine). What it lost in Gaza, is grip on the narrative.
From what I’ve seen from various news outlets, I’m going to pull my hair out if this keeps being referred to like a marketing problem or a brand issue. How many social media likes or dislikes is Israel getting? What do opinion polls and focus groups say about this or that country?
WTF?!
If one country isn’t being targeted, then another is in the cross-hairs at that moment. More territory taken.
And, so this article reminds us, the same country is ALSO still able to supply – during this time – military weapons and assorted military goods to other countries all over the globe.
Looks to me like that is causing death and stopping all of that NOW is what works – especially for those on the receiving end of bombs and bullets.
It’s not a marketing or “brand” issue that is going to be solved through changing public opinion.
Nor will the other favorite cop out be of any use: “The next generation is going to fix it.”
Not if this is what is being taught.
the french killed 1.5 million algerians in the late 1950s, British similarly in Kenya (and still do human rights violations there).
Europe, please spare us the sermon. Russia will deal with you.
The real question is why do we allow Ziostan to exist? Pretty much every Jewish Ziostanist wants the genocide to be completed come hell or high water. Most of the world does not. It is not usually a good idea to hold every person responsible for the actions of it’s government, but in this case it makes absolute sense.
This artificial state without known borders needs to be abolished, it’s building used to provide aid, shelter and homes to to the surviving Palestinians and justice must be meted out to individuals in proportion to their crimes – an eye for an eye must be our guiding principle to set an example to others.
Officials in other countries complicit in this crime must also face justice and the harshest penalties for their crimes and we must never have another failure like Nuremburg, where many of the worst criminals were spirited away by the US, UK and other anglophone counties so they could benefit from the knowledge and skills gained by the bestials during Hitler’s reign instead of dancing on the end of a rope.
Perhaps they should spare the sermon; but they should engage in effective action.
All the nations who did evil in the past, if they say they repent, then they must take action now to uphold their words and thought. Guilt is for the past actions, not to stop virtuous action in the present.
This is not a famine. It is a genocide, Zarah Sultana is telling it how it is, and is widely supported in that view, but under constant Zionist media attacks here in the UK.
Just as Blair’s slavish loyalty to the USA permanently damaged his reputation over the Iraq shambles, especially with the lying to Parliament, so Starmer is in a comparable situation now. Hopefully his loss of face will be permanently scarrring.
As he has run a punitive internal regime, Labour MPs can’t even really speak up publicly about the continued passive and active support for Netanyahu’s genocide without being severely disciplined, so are reduced to the occasional performative collective letter of objection, seeking to limit the damage to their prospects of re-election, but internal party support for his approach is reluctant at best, and condemnatory for many. There will be a reckoning.
Everyone knows Starmer’s two kids are being brought up in the Jewish faith, and that several of his major advisers and personal funders are Jewish, so he has an intensely biassed starting position, but much of the loss of faith in his government is down to his ambivalence about the sufferings of Palestinians. And he is still dragging his heels as the famine bites.
Hopefully, we’ll see a change soon but he still hasn’t really sussed out that his stubborn mealy mouthed pro-Zionist position is on an election losing scale, though many of his MPs have.
Given that McSweeney, his trusted Svengali, still thinks that purging the left and reducing the traditional Labour broad church to a centre right rump party is a winning approach, then Starmer’s inner circle is firmly in group think mode. No wonder the new Sultana/Corbyn centre-left party has well over 500k registered supporters in under a week.
The EU are worse, but German business interests, and persistent national collective guilt, are dominating the EU’s approach to Levantine war mongering.
One day the Israeli public will be in the same position as the Germans were post WW2.
Primo Levi’s “The Drowned and the Saved” ought to be compulsory reading for those complicit Israelis trampling Gazan emergency food supplies.
Is Europe losing its soul in Gaza or did that happen long ago in India, South Africa, Kenya, Vietnam, China, etc? In fact it’s only natural that Europe would support a predatory settler/colonial society in the Middle East given what Brussels did to the Congo or the millions of Indians Churchill allowed to starve during WW2. Here in the US our slavery history is not exactly a source of pride either.
What is being lost is the myth that the slaughter of WW2–itself an outgrowth of colonialism–brought forth a new world where international law matters. Even the excuses are the same and Kipling declared imperialism to be a white man’s “burden” just as Golda Meir said the Palestinians were forcing the Israelis to kill their children. Sure they shoot say the Israelis, but they also cry.
But the hypocrisy of it all could be a mistake given that the victims are likely to start shooting, and crying, back.Might makes right is wearying, and you have to maintain large military establishments that drain resources and distort priorities. The cost of self delusion may weigh especially on a tiny country of 9 1/2 million that aspires to rule the Western world. That rabbit hole is getting pretty deep.
Excellent points. I’ll just add that the UK starved tens of millions of Indians the 19th century too.
Thanks, Nick Corbishley. This observation by the esteemed Jonathan Cook, which you use as a conclusion, is important: ‘As Cook writes, “Israel – the world’s biggest incubator for the arms and surveillance industries – is simply too big and too important to be allowed to fail. Even as it commits genocide”.’
Looking at the Epstein affair, which seems to go on forever, because it was not meant to be made public, it seems to me that the kernel is money laundering. The traffic in underage women was a technique to keep the marks in line (absolute power corrupts absolutely). Yet the iceberg, still below the surface, is how Epstein got his hands on so much money without investors or capital. So there’s the money angle — spies with valuta.
Something that has been bothering me about the Epstein affair is encapsulated in Cook’s observation: Epstein was involved in a major network of flimflam and bribes and blackmail. Yet it was well known for years, and certainly in his heyday, that Israelis regularly engaged in industrial espionage in the US of A and Europe.
He didn’t have to do that, I suppose: His job was to force the elites into support for the Israeli government. He was about money, about the endless avarice and gullibility of the rich. Meanwhile, the arms and surveillance industries likely kept the industrial espionage going. Specialization! It could be a Harvard Biz School case study.
So the elites are too much entrapped in their own clever-by-halfness to ever deal with the Israeli government, the illegal settlements on the West Bank, and the genocide in Gaza.
No wonder Francesca Albanese annoys them. Pope Francesco called out the proxy wars for what they are (include Ukraine): slaughter and genocide. Now Albanese is showing how to follow the money.
In a few years, everyone will have downloaded (if we haven’t already) spy software and backdoors to our cellular phones. And no will remember the Armenians, so it is just a matter of time for the Palestinians, eh.
Epstein: He blinded them with science.
Europe and the US are supporting the genocide in Gaza because Israel is the last colonial outpost in the Middle East, key to controlling the greatest natural resource prize on earth.
The greatest natural resource prize on Earth is Russia.
But the USA has no military bases in Israel but does in UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia.
A colonial outpost with a small USA military presence at the USA Jerusalem embassy is not much force projection.
And how has this given the USA the “key to controlling the greatest natural resource prize on earth”?
It might have much more effective for the USA to simply invade and take over the militarily weak middle east oil countries than to use Israel as an assumed outpost.
Note, Israel does not have oil.
As John McCain could have stated, the Middle East oil countries are even easier to confront than Russia as they are “gas stations without nukes”
Israel does not control strategic routes, straights, or pipelines, it does not have natural resources, it is a negligible player in agriculture (it imports the vast majority of its food), does not have a strategic industry (its surveillance, spyware, and military sector is significant, but replaceable and easily relocatable), its size makes it extremely vulnerable against a peer adversary, and the only time its military was of any real help was in 1956 against Egypt. Strategically, Israel is dispensable.
Fundamentally, Western, especially European, countries support Israel because it is the place where they can offload their Jewish population, something they have been striving for during a thousands years or so, and they do not want to see that population coming back.
Besides, there is a deep racist hatred towards Arabs (and associated peoples like Berbers) in Europe — particularly after their impertinent behaviour against their European colonial masters — so if zionists slaughter Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, and Yemenis, so much the better.
Thanks Nick, heart rending as it is to read.
Genocide has been as natural as a fish swimming in water to the European and US colonial powers for the last 500 years. The difference is that the people, fed a constant bombardment of self-righteous congratulatory propaganda about doing god’s work against evil, never learned about the genocides in a meaningful timeframe (oh, those poor XXXX, it’s so sad they disappeared). This allowed leaders in the modern era to claim legitimacy (no longer from divine rights) in their conduct of the ultimate evil.
The difference is that the Gaza genocide has been live-streamed, and the West’s governmental system is becoming seen as illegitimate (apparently, a generational shift is required) – a massive source of societal instability. The West no longer controls the narrative (most strongly amongst the youth), unlike the Cold War era genocides conducted by the (oh so autocratic) Western democracies.
This is being enabled by the dramatic shift back to the norm (over the last 2000 years) of the West being a minor player in the global economy, along with the shift in technology (and narrative). The Federation (in Star Trek) will speak Chinese and will remember the five centuries of Western genocide as a morality story of evil. Will the West’s positives, like Bach and Mozart, be shunned as everything Nazi is today?
Israel is popular with Western countries because it is the only place where white people can kill people of color with impunity and still play the victim. This must be appealing to those who are fed up with the “invasion” of immigrants.