Photo: Josep Borrell, High Rep, EU for Foreign Affairs & Security Policy.
(Credit: Pietro Naj-Oleari/European Parliament Flickr Commons)

Hamed Chapman

The European Union’s foreign policy chief has acknowledged that the 27-nation bloc applies double standards when it comes to the wars in Ukraine and Israeli-occupied Palestine, saying double standards permeate international relations anyway.

“We are often criticised for having double standards. But international politics is, to a large degree, about applying double standards. We do not use the same criteria for all problems,” Josep Borrell said when asked why Brussels is so much more willing to support the people of Ukraine than the people of Gaza.

Israel has launched repeated offensives in both Gaza and the West Bank, territories it has militarily occupied for decades in defiance of numerous UN resolutions, both before and since Russia invaded Ukraine in February this year, killing and injuring thousands of Palestinian civilians.

The latest was launched on August 5 and lasted several days, during which some 49 Palestinians were killed, including 17 children and three women, and injured over 360 others.

In his interview with El Pais newspaper, Borrell claimed that the EU supported the Ukrainian government with weapons and aid while imposing a series of sanctions against Russian President, Vladimir Putin, and his government because it was a “moral imperative” for western nations.

But “resolving the situation with those people trapped in an open-air prison, which Gaza is, is not in the hands of the EU,” he insisted, despite calling the deteriorating situation in Gaza “scandalous” and “a shame” but would not be drawn on the origins of the humanitarian catastrophe.

Instead, the EU foreign policy chief suggested that it was the US that was to blame for a lack of resolution to what is commonly called the Middle East conflict, saying there was no solution “without a very strong commitment on the part of the US.”

The West has been frequently criticised for its lack of response to the plight of the Palestinians as well as other wars and conflicts, especially in Muslim countries, particularly in response to the scale of support afforded to Ukraine in what some analysts have suggested is being used to try to bring about regime change in Moscow.