'Under siege, locked away' Palestinians have been 'depersonalised in Western political imagination'
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00:00 The UN Secretary General is calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.
00:04 Antonio Guterres alleging violations of international law have been committed in the enclave since
00:09 the conflict broke out.
00:11 The comments made at a high-level session of the UN Security Council angering Israel
00:15 and prompting a tough response.
00:18 I am deeply concerned about the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we
00:23 are witnessing in Gaza.
00:25 It is important to also recognize the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum.
00:32 The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.
00:38 Avigail, three years old, tell me, what is a proportionate response for killing of babies?
00:48 How can you agree to a ceasefire with someone who swore to kill and destroy your own existence?
00:56 How?
00:57 Now, Jordan's King Abdullah has told the French President that Israel needs to be pressured
01:03 by global powers to end its war in Gaza.
01:07 The comments made in Amman come as Emmanuel Macron continues his tour of the Middle East.
01:12 Macron will also be meeting Egypt's President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi later on today.
01:16 His visit comes a day after he sat down with Israel's leadership to show France's solidarity
01:22 in the wake of the October 7th attack.
01:25 He also met with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah yesterday to reiterate Paris'
01:30 commitment to a two-state solution.
01:35 Jordan's Queen Irania has broken her silence since the events of October 7th broke out
01:40 and the Israeli response to Hamas in Gaza.
01:43 In an interview to CNN, the monarch, who has Palestinian roots, criticized what she called
01:48 Western hypocrisy when it comes to calling out crimes committed by Israel.
01:53 I think the people all around the Middle East, including in Jordan, we are just shocked and
01:59 disappointed by the world's reaction to this catastrophe that is unfolding.
02:04 In the last couple of weeks, we have seen a glaring double standard in the world.
02:10 When October 7th happened, the world immediately and unequivocally stood by Israel and its
02:17 right to defend itself and condemned the attack that happened.
02:21 But what we're seeing in the last couple of weeks, we're seeing silence in the world.
02:27 You know, countries have stopped just expressing concern or acknowledging the casualties, but
02:33 always with a preface of declaration of support for Israel.
02:38 And are we being told that it is wrong to kill a family, an entire family at gunpoint,
02:46 but it's OK to shell them to death?
02:48 I mean, there is a glaring double standard here.
02:52 And it is just shocking to the Arab world.
02:55 This is the first time in modern history that there is such human suffering and the world
03:00 is not even calling for a ceasefire.
03:02 So the silence is deafening.
03:04 And to many in our region, it makes the Western world complicit, you know, through their support
03:10 and through the cover that they give Israel that it is just its right to defend itself.
03:16 Many in the Arab world are looking at the Western world as not just tolerating this,
03:19 but as aiding and abetting it.
03:23 We can now bring in Julian Barnes-Daisy, director of the Middle East and North Africa program
03:28 at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
03:31 Thank you very much for joining us on the program today.
03:34 You just heard there from Queen Rania calling out the double standards from many Western
03:39 governments, something her husband reiterated a couple of days ago.
03:43 Where are Europe's morals when it comes to what's going on in Gaza?
03:48 Well, I think that there are a lot of questions being asked related to that at the moment.
03:55 Clearly, as Queen Rania said, there was an immediate strong emphasis of solidarity with
04:03 Israel in response to Hamas's initial attacks.
04:07 But that solidarity has not combined itself with similar solidarity to Palestinians who
04:14 are now suffering under the onslaught of this Israeli attack.
04:18 And it's raising questions not just across the Middle East, but across the wider global
04:22 South and increasingly even within popular voices across Europe in terms of how can Europe,
04:27 on the one hand, make claims not just related to the attacks by Hamas, but also to the Russian
04:34 invasion of Ukraine, and then not be willing to be more emphatic in holding the same values
04:40 when it comes to protecting and defending Palestinian lives.
04:43 Exactly.
04:44 And it just really exposes the hypocrisy because we have today 2,700 children who have been
04:52 killed since the 7th of October over in Gaza.
04:55 A lot less children were killed in Ukraine by Russian strikes, yet European leaders were
05:02 very quick to call those deaths out and call out those alleged Russian war crimes, but
05:09 not discuss the crimes that are going on in Gaza.
05:13 Absolutely.
05:14 And I think it speaks to the nature of kind of the European relationship at large with
05:22 Israel.
05:23 There's clearly a closeness there.
05:25 There was clearly a kind of a personalized kind of sense of brutality associated with
05:31 Hamas's attacks.
05:33 The Palestinians, as many people have said for a long time, have very much in a sense
05:38 been depersonalized in the Western political imagination.
05:42 They've been living under siege, locked away for so long now.
05:47 And in a sense, it means there isn't that same connection, that same political affinity
05:51 you see between Europe and Israel.
05:54 But questions are being asked, and it is raising hard questions because the global South is
05:59 putting them on the spot.
06:01 Middle Eastern leaders are putting them on the spot and saying to them, well, these Palestinian
06:05 lives surely should matter.
06:07 Yes, Hamas is a terrorist organization.
06:09 Yes, it committed brutal acts of terror.
06:12 But surely the indiscriminate violence being unleashed against Palestinian civilians now
06:18 is not worthy of kind of European values in the same sense.
06:22 Exactly.
06:23 I wanted to talk about the global South, because in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine,
06:27 we did see Europe try to rally the global South and get them to back Ukraine and stand
06:34 up to Russia.
06:37 Surely Europe has lost any moral high ground now in the wake of what has happened and its
06:42 reaction?
06:43 Well, Europe is scrambling.
06:48 Clearly there have been some intra-European debates and divisions over this.
06:53 You saw van der Leyen, the president of the EU Commission, going to Israel.
06:57 She's getting a lot of flack for her response.
06:59 And was criticized because she didn't mention international law and the need for Israel
07:03 to comply with that.
07:04 She was criticized by none less than Joseph Borrell, the EU's head of foreign policy,
07:10 who said that actually she shouldn't be speaking on those issues.
07:13 And he's been very vocal in talking about the need for international law.
07:17 And you see similar divisions across European states.
07:19 The Germans and the UK lining up very strongly behind Israel.
07:24 Other states like Ireland and Switzerland being more vocal about humanitarian law.
07:29 But all that being said, I think the reality is even where there is cause for international
07:35 law to be applied, there is very little willingness to match that with meaningful pressure on
07:41 the Israeli government to actually implement that.
07:44 So in a sense, there's broad talking points, but there's an unwillingness to engage in
07:48 pressure on Israel on the back of the Hamas attacks.
07:52 Let's talk about this whistle stop tour that the French president Emmanuel Macron is on
07:55 of the Middle East.
07:57 Will anything come out of it, considering that most countries in the Middle East do
08:02 not consider Hamas a terrorist organization?
08:05 Bottom line, no, I don't think much will come out of it.
08:09 Not because of the position on Hamas, but mostly because the key actors here are the
08:16 U.S. and perhaps on the other side, the Iranians.
08:19 It's the U.S., which is the one country that can really pressure and push the Israelis
08:26 to have a change of military strategy.
08:28 On the other side, it's Iran that has important influence, not just on Hamas, but on other
08:33 groups such as Hezbollah with the threat of a broader multi-front conflict hanging over
08:37 this.
08:38 So yes, Macron is in the region.
08:40 Yes, he's trying to create some avenues for progress that helps the Palestinians, that
08:47 brings back into sight the need for a political track.
08:51 But he, like others, has given his full solidarity with Israel.
08:56 He's talked about an anti-terror campaign along the lines of the anti-ISIS campaign,
09:01 which won't go down very well in the Arab world, given the sense that Hamas is not just
09:05 a terrorist organization, but a result of Palestinian political marginalization, a result
09:13 of the fact that Israel has been occupying Palestinian land for decades now without any
09:19 Western response.