For three years the Von der Leyen Commission has been secretly negotiating to hand over its citizens’ data to a state committing multiple genocides.
Tel Aviv may have lost the hearts and minds of the vast majority of people in the so-called “collective West” a long time ago, but it can still count on the support, however reluctant, of most of their governments.
Since the ongoing genocide in Gaza began almost three years ago, only a tiny handful of nations have cut or downgraded their relations with Israel. Some of those countries (Colombia, Honduras, Chile and Bolivia) have since reversed course following a change of government.
Public support for Israel in Western Europe is now at its lowest point ever, according to a recent YouGov poll. Fewer than a fifth of respondents in the six countries polled still hold a favourable view of the country.
Earlier this year, over a million EU citizens signed a petition calling for the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement via a European Citizens’ Initiative. In April, the governments of Spain, Slovenia and Ireland proposed to suspend the association agreement. That was enough to force the EU Council to at least pretend to consider the idea before the governments of Germany and Italy poured cold water all over it.
As a result, billions of dollars worth of trade, much of it military gear and tech, continues to flow between the Jewish State and the EU, Israel’s biggest trade partner, each month. Meanwhile, the lack of any real consequences for its ever-growing roster of war crimes in Gaza means that Israel has felt free to further expand its genocidal campaign.
In Southern Lebanon an estimated 20% of the region’s farmland and forests have been destroyed and 270,000 residents displaced, according to a recent FT report. As Shaiel Ben-Ephraim notes, “this is stated policy and an intentional plan to make an entire area uninhabitable and never allow the population to return.”
Israel is now doing much the same in the West Bank. In recent days, the Netanyahu government, with Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich reportedly in the driving seat, has opened tenders for the construction of some 1,200 settlement homes in East Jerusalem — a hugely provocative move even by Tel Aviv’s recent standards.
As the settlers’ attacks on targets in the West Bank grow in both scale and ferocity, the governments of the West have found themselves in the embarrassing position of having no one but Israel to blame — in the West Bank there is no Hamas or Hezbollah to scapegoat. Their response this week was to sign a joint statement feigning anger about the rising violence while doing absolutely nothing to stop it.
In March, a group of United Nations experts warned that the genocide in Gaza is bleeding into the West Bank, as violence and Israeli military operations escalate across the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
“Under the cover of an existential war against the Palestinians, Israel is accelerating measures that alter Jerusalem’s demographic composition, religious character and legal status, destroying the remnants of the pluralistic fabric that Jerusalem has represented for centuries, for Muslims, Christians and Jews,” the experts said, adding,
Yet the EU can’t even reach consensus on imposing full trade sanctions on illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, an area in which it has invested billions of euros over the past few decades but which is now under constant attack by state-sponsored terrorist invaders.
The Ultimate Betrayal
But Brussels is not just sitting on its hands as this all plays out. According to an exclusive report by EU Observer and State Watch, the EU’s Von der Leyen Commission has been secretly negotiating a deal that would allow the wholesale transfer of sensitive personal data from EU systems to Israeli authorities.
That data would apparently include the biometric information, genetic data, location tracking, political opinions, health information and trade union affiliations of EU citizens. The agreement would operate through Europol, the EU’s policing agency, and the data would be available to Israel’s National Police and internal security service, Shin Bet.
The proposed agreement would represent a huge step up from a 2018 deal that explicitly ruled out personal data sharing and explicitly excluded the occupied Palestinian territories. This version includes both.
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Nick Corbishley 