(CN) — The eruption of war between Israel and Hamas became the latest jarring crisis to rock European Union politics and underscored the bloc's weakness in containing a series of conflicts raging outside its borders.
On Tuesday, EU diplomats and leaders scrambled to respond to the outbreak of war in Israel, which entered its fourth day, and they called for a resumption of Middle East peace talks. But the EU's influence over containing the conflict was limited, experts said.
Fighting between Israel and Hamas has killed at least 1,600 people and the death toll was likely to rise steeply with Israel's military bombarding Gaza and preparing to launch a ground invasion of the Palestinian enclave.
After Hamas launched its attack on Saturday, its militants committed massacres and took scores of hostages. European leaders condemned the militant group, declaring them terrorists, and vowed to support Israel.
But the EU's diplomatic powers are very much in doubt as the conflict threatens to spiral into a regional war that could stoke racial, religious and political tensions in Europe, create a new wave of refugees seeking entry to the EU, drive up energy prices at a moment of economic fragility and foster even more instability at the EU's edges. In Europe, there are also concerns the Middle East conflict will draw attention away from the war in Ukraine and divert American military aid from Kyiv.
In recent years, EU leaders have pushed to make the bloc a bigger player in world affairs while also championing a belief in international institutions and multilateral solutions.
But its aspirations to become a geopolitical player have shown few results and the EU is struggling with a number of conflicts close to its borders, including the war in Ukraine, Azerbaijan's war against ethnic Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh and a simmering conflict between Serbia and Kosovo.
“Events in Israel make clear the EU's impotence and inability to shape world around it,” said Mujtaba Rahman, a Europe expert at the Eurasia Group, a political risk firm.
He lamented that Europe has become “irrelevant” in the Middle East, could not stop Azerbaijan from using its military to drive out the ethnic Armenian population from Nagorno-Karabakh and would be unable to provide Ukraine with the military support it needs in the event that American funding dries up.
Hugh Lovatt, a Middle East expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations, doubted European leaders will be able to stop the fighting in Israel.
“Theoretically, Europe does have some sway and some leverage over Israel, but it has over the decades proven very reluctant to use that,” Lovatt said, speaking to France 24, a French public broadcaster.
He said the outbreak of war in Israel highlights the failures of diplomacy.
“We need to recognize that where we are today is above all a political failure, a collapse in the Middle East peace process,” he said. “There is collective blame and there's European blame for that in terms of international lack of attention and diligence over years.”
In an analysis, he said even though the EU had invested more than $2 billion into the Palestinian Authority, which oversees the West Bank, and Palestinian institutions since 2007, “few countries took the next step to recognize Palestine, let alone meaningfully support Palestinian sovereignty on the ground.”
He called those EU investments “squandered.”
On Monday, a row broke out among EU states after Olivér Várhelyi, a European commissioner from Hungary, announced the EU was cutting $729 million in funding to Palestine.
But the EU quickly backtracked after some states rejected that proposal, arguing that freezing aid over the Hamas attack amounted to punishing the Palestinian population as a whole. Still, the EU said it was reviewing its aid processes. There are allegations EU funds have wound up funding Hamas.
Lovatt argued EU funds have allowed the Palestinian Authority to survive and that starving it of money would mean “only an even greater political and security vacuum in the West Bank.”
Lovatt also blamed European leaders for not doing enough to restrain Israel from seizing Palestinian territories and mistreating the Palestinian population.
Meanwhile, he said Europe failed to develop a “political track” with Hamas and therefore has no leverage to pressure the group.
“Unfortunately, our options are quite limited,” he said.
Nonetheless, he said the EU must try to stop the war from spreading and turning into a regional conflict.
He warned that Russia may seek to use the war in Israel as a new method to cast doubt on Europe's commitment to international humanitarian law by not condemning Israel's ferocious bombing of Gaza Strip and move to cut off all essential supplies to the 2 million people inside the enclave.
“It is also another opportunity for Russia, obviously very cynically and hypocritically,” Lovatt said, to “show how Europe, the U.S., do not appear to be upholding international law.”
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.
Follow @cainburdeau
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