By Patrick Lawrence / Consortium News
Zurich — It is many years now since the French, bless them, revolted as Disneyland Paris arose near the previously uninvaded village of Marne-la–Vallée–Chessy.
Soon enough came the Disney Hôtel New York, the Disney Hôtel Santa Fe, the Disney Hôtel Cheyenne, the Disney Newport Club, the Disney Sequoia Lodge, Disney Village, Parc Disneyland, Parc Walt Disney Studios. Let us not omit Star Wars Hypersonic Mountain among these monuments to the Americanization of Europe.
Blocking imports of American “culture,” and we need the quotation marks, is among the world’s more quixotic undertakings, given the failure rate. But losing the battle against the infantilization of European sensibilities seems the least of the Continent’s worries at this point.
The irrational Russophobia, the proxy war in Ukraine, the disruption of the Continent’s natural place as Eurasia’s western flank, the conjured-from-nothing “threat” of Russian expansionism, support of Israel’s siege of Gaza: These are U.S. imports, too, and Europe finds itself in crisis in consequence of them.
Who are we, Europeans now ask in one or another way. What have we made of ourselves? Are we always to be America’s obedient underlings, taking all orders and refusing none? What has become of us in the 21st century?
European social democracy in its various forms has been vulnerable to the attacks of market fundamentalists and neoconservative ideologues for many years. Now the apostles of “savage capitalism,” as its Latin American casualties call it, and their warmongering siblings begin, this time in the name of Cold War II, what appears to be their final assault.
Europe has vacillated between two contradictory impulses — asserting its sovereignty and succumbing to an undignified dependence on American power — since the mid–Cold War years. Charles De Gaulle was the last European leader to stand with conviction for the Continent’s independence and autonomy.
But Gaullism is no more than a faint and far-off light around Europe today. I reluctantly conclude that, in the moment of truth now upon it, the Continent will make the unwise choice, a self-condemnation that could endure for decades to come.
A long-evident divide between Europeans and those who purport to lead them now widens. The former defend what remains of the socially advanced state erected across the Continent during the first postwar decades.
The latter are poised to tear it down to import a version of America’s military-industrial complex precisely as The Walt Disney Company brought Sleeping Beauty’s Castle to the French capital’s outskirts.
“Europe’s leaders have woken up to hard power” is the headline atop a commentary Janan Ganesh, a Financial Times columnist, published on this topic last week. “To militarize as much as it needs to,” he wrote, “Europe needs its citizens to bear higher taxes or a smaller welfare state.”
This is bitterly succinct. Europe’s leaders and the media that serve them are in the process of normalizing the “need” to turn Europe into a warrior state in the American image — suffused with animus and paranoia, beset with “threats,” never at ease as the social fabric deteriorates.
Identity Crisis
An acute identity crisis — and this is at bottom Europe’s present disorder — has been rolling the Continent’s way like a big, black bowling ball since, I would say, the U.S. began to realize that Vladimir Putin was other than his pliant predecessor as Russia’s president. It has been ever more obvious lately, as I noted in this space a year ago.
“Howitzers instead of hospitals” is how The New York Times put the case at the time. Again, it is dismally on the mark.
There are various reasons the choice Europe faces has since grown yet starker.
One, the Ukraine war is lost and America’s enthusiasm for the Kiev regime has plainly weakened. This leaves Europe to manage the mess on its doorstep while the U.S. can, as is its habit, “move on.”
Hence the European Union’s commitment two months ago to provide Ukraine with €50 billion in “reliable and predictable financial support” over the next four years.
Two, Donald Trump has reignited talk of either a North Atlantic Treaty Organization without the U.S. or the disintegration of NATO. The first of these is a logical impossibility: Is NATO anything more than Washington’s instrument for projecting power across the Atlantic?
And the pleasing thought of life without NATO is, very regrettably, nowhere near even a medium-term possibility. The whither–NATO conversation has nonetheless prompted European leaders to think, or appear to think.
Emmanuel Macron is not stepping back from his assertion last month that Europe must be prepared to send ground troops to the Ukrainian front — this despite vigorous objections to the French president’s position.
Macron, who nurses a de Gaulle complex, purports to favor a more independent Europe when he says such things, and there are those who buy into it. “If we want to be peacekeepers in the world,” Antonio Tajani, Italy’s foreign minister, said in an interview with La Stampa a couple of months ago, “we need a European military.”
I find this sort of thinking altogether facile. Josep Borrell, the E.U.’s usefully forthright foreign policy chief, went straight at the reality when he outlined “the four main tasks on E.U.’s geopolitical agenda” in his speech to the Munich Security Conference two months ago.
The second of these was, yes, “strengthening our defense and security.” The fourth was “sustaining these efforts in cooperation with key partners, and in particular the U.S.”
I thought Borrell was impossibly paradoxical when I first read his remarks in External Action, an online E.U. publication. On reflection, he seems simply a man of forthrightly stated realpolitik: Europe can arm itself all it wants; its current leaders will keep it a dependent adjunct of the U.S. imperium.
It is not difficult to detect among Europeans their restive dissatisfaction with the direction Europe’s leaders are choosing. You find among them a fundamental desire to reject all Cold War-like animosities and live plainly and simply as Europeans.
Polls indicate that large proportions of those surveyed do not trust the U.S. These polls also record a similar distrust of “Putin,” but this reflects the power of the relentless propaganda in major European media as they incessantly demonize the Russian president, as there is considerable acceptance of Europe’s position as the western flank of the Eurasian landmass and the interdependence with Russia this implies.
Zeit–Fragen, a German-language journal published here (and in French and English as Horizons et débats and Current Concerns), recently quoted Egon Bahr, a former German minister and a key figure in the design of the Federal Republic’s Ostpolitik, on this topic.
“Our self-determination stands alongside and not against America,” Bahr said. “[But] we cannot give up Russia because America doesn’t like it.”
Bahr spoke at the German–Russian Forum in Berlin six years ago. As Zeit–Fragen’s editors make clear, the speech still resonates because the majority of Germans — and considerable proportions of other Europeans — strongly favor a return to the rapprochement with Russia the U.S. has more or less required Europeans to abandon.
“Who thinks voters will prioritize rearmament?” Janan Ganesh asked in his FT column last week. “There is little to suggest electorates are willing to accept a rupture of the welfarist social contract in order to tool up.”
I hope Ganesh is right in this observation. As Europeans try to rediscover who they are, the historical magnitude of this moment is difficult to overstate.
The very best one hopes for now is a ripping confrontation between the defenders of Europe-for–Europeans and those who sponsor a version of the militarized monster that long ago overtook America.
Barricades, blocked highways, yellow vests, occupied ministries: As we used to say in the 1960s, “Let it happen, Cap’n.” This will be a war worth waging for the Continent’s soul.
By Zehra Imam / Mondoweiss
As Palestinians are slaughtered by the thousands in Gaza and violently attacked during night prayers in the al-Aqsa Mosque by Israel, the West Bank endures massacres that at times go unnoticed during this holy month. I have spent my Ramadan in conversation with a friend from Jenin.
Much has changed since I visited Aseel (not her real name) in August 2023. There are things I saw in Jenin that no longer exist. One of them is my friend’s smile and her spark.
Usually, they say Jenin is a small Gaza. During Ramadan, because the attacks generally happen at night, people are an easy target because they are on the streets late at night. In the past, it was rare for the IOF to enter during the day. Now, they attack during the day; their special forces enter, and after people discover them, their soldiers come within minutes.
Every 2-3 days, there is a new attack in Jenin. In our minds, there is a constant ringing that the IOF may come. We don’t know at what time we will be targeted or when they will enter. There is no stability in our lives.
Even when we plan for something, we hedge it with our inshallahs and laugh. There are a lot of ifs. If they don’t enter the camp. If there are no martyrs. If there is no strike.
On the second day of Ramadan, they attacked my neighborhood again. We thought it was a bombing because it started with an explosion, but the house was shaking. We were praying fajr, and everyone was screaming outside. The sound of the drone was in our ears. “No, these are missiles,” we realized.
There was panic in the streets. Women fainted. People had been walking back from praying at the mosque, and some were still in the street. Alhamdulillah, no one was hurt, we say.
The balcony to the room at my uncle’s house where we slept had fallen. It no longer had any glass, and a bullet entered my uncle’s bedroom and reached the kitchen. The drone hit the trees in front of our house. The missiles destroyed the ceiling, and the rockets reached my neighbor’s house on the first floor, exactly in front of our house.
Since October 7, Jenin has become a target. There is a clear escalation in the camp and the city. The IOF has used many different weapons to kill us here. They have even been aggressive toward the infrastructure, as though every inch of our city was resisting them.
They destroyed much of the camp, and there is no entrance now. The arch is gone, and there is no sign reminding us that Jenin refugee camp is a temporary place. There is no horse. Only the street is left. You have the photographs. You were lucky. They changed the shape of the camp, and everything has been destroyed.”Aseel
The first time Aseel and I met in person was in Nablus at the Martyrs Roundabout. As we caught up, we ate a delicious concoction of ice cream, milk, nuts, and fresh fruit that was a perfect balm to the heat. She took me to some of her favorite places nestled within the old city of Nablus. A 150-year-old barber’s shop that felt like you had entered an antique store where plants reached the ceiling and where the barber was a massive fan of Angelina Jolie. A centuries-old house now called Tree House Cafe looked like a hobbit home from Lord of the Rings, where we hid away as she sipped her coffee and I drank a mint lemonade. We visited one of the oldest soap factories in the world with ingredients such as goat’s milk and olive oil, jasmine and pomegranates, even dates and Dead Sea mud.
We happened to chance upon a Sufi zawiya as we walked through a beautiful archway decorated with lanterns, light bulbs, and an assortment of potted plants, after which we saw a cobalt blue door on our left and an azul blue door with symmetrical red designs, and Quranic ayat like incantations on our right as doors upon doors greeted us.
The air was welcoming yet mingled with the memory of martyrs whose memorials took over the landscape, sometimes in the form of larger-than-life portraits surrounded by complex four-leafed magenta-white flowers; posters above a water spout next to a heart-shaped leaf; a melted motorcycle that, too, was targeted in the neighborhood that hosted the Lions’ Den. We stopped to pray at a masjid, quiet and carpeted.
After a bus ride from Nablus to Jenin, on our walk before entering Jenin camp, Aseel showed me the hospital right outside the camp. She pointed out the barricades created to keep the occupation forces from entering specific streets. This is the same hospital that the occupation forces blocked during the July 2023 attack, which now seems like a lifetime ago.
What caught my eyes again and again were the two Keys of Return on top of the entrance of Jenin Camp that symbolized so much for Palestinians.
“This is a temporary station,” Aseel read out loud to me. “That’s what it says. We are supposed to return to our homes.”
“Netanyahu said he is planning another big attack, so the resistance fighters are preparing because it can happen any day,” she had told me that evening as we shared Jenin-style knafeh, baked to perfection. Then she stopped, looked at the sky, and said humorously, “Ya Allah, hopefully not today!” And we both laughed because of its potential reality.
Dinner on the terrace at her uncle’s home was a delicious spread of hummus, laban, fries, cucumbers pickled by her aunt, and arayes — fried bread stuffed with meat. Then we moved the furniture to sleep on mattresses in a room that extended to the rooftop terrace with a breeze, overlooking Jenin Camp and the rest of Jenin City. We could hear gunshots in the distance. The drones were commonplace, and the heat did not relent. Temperatures soared, and the electricity was out when we woke up at 5 a.m. I heard her pray, and later, as we sipped on coffee and had wafters in the early morning at her home, my eyes went to a piece of tatreez, or embroidery, of a bird in flight framed on the wall. Her eyes followed mine and when I said I loved it.
“It used to be my grandfather’s,” she told me. “Of course it’s beautiful — the bird is free.”
Unexpectedly, Aseel’s mother gifted me a Sprite bottle full of olive oil beholding the sweet hues of its intact health, which I would later ship secretly from Bethlehem all the way to Boston. And then Aseel came to me with a gift, too: a necklace that spoke succinctly about the right to return and live on this earth. Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry was held together with intricate calligraphy carved in the shape of Palestine’s landscape, and I was completely overwhelmed.
“You are in Palestine, my dear,” she had smiled. “And you are now my family. This is your country, this is your second home, really.”
When I ask her about what brings her hope these days, Aseel tells me about her eight-year-old nephew.
He wanted to eat two meals. I told him that in Gaza they don’t have food. He was complaining about the food, and I told him, they don’t have water. And he heard me because he said, “today, we will only have one meal.”
I’m amazed at how mature he is. He even said, “We won’t make a special cake on Eid because of the Gazans.” For me, this is a lesson to be learned. He is only eight years old, but he knows.
We have lost a lot of people in Gaza, but here in the West Bank, we are succeeding because our new generation knows a lot. Ben Gurion would not be happy. He said of Palestinians, “the old will die and the young will forget.” No, the young ask even more questions. The new generation brings us hope. Hope is the new generation.
/sp
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Patrick Lawrence
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.