The EU’s smiley-face racism and erasure of Palestinian history

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Seriously, what is the deal with EU politicians and their racist garden analogies? Are these people bureaucrats or botanists?

Just six months after EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell managed to offend Black and Brown people across the globe by saying that “Europe is a garden” and “most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden," European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen picked up the baton from her colleague. In a promotional video that made a mockery of 75 years of Palestinian suffering at the hands of Zionist supremacist settler colonialism, she congratulated "Israel" for making “the desert bloom.”

Move over, Sting, there’s a new “Desert Rose” crooner in town, and her name is Ursula (ironically, Rose Ladson was the pseudonym under which von der Leyen attended the London School of Economics during her student years, so that might explain her choice of flower-based imagery).

"Israel" is not a garden in the desert. It is an artificial greenhouse where the flowers of legitimacy refuse to grow naturally. How does the saying go: land you have to kill for is not yours, land you die for is? The 100 and more Palestinians murdered by "Israel" this year alone are a stark reminder of who the occupier (dare I say invader?) is and who the traditional owner of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is.

Non-Eurocentric news outlets and social media were swift to check the EU’s top pro-"Israel" propagandist who Politico once described as being surrounded by a “perpetual whiff of scandal” and condemn her controversial 90-second hymn of praise that intentionally omitted the Nakba from the historical context of "Israel’s" creation.

Probably the most powerful backlash came from a social media video posted by Rabet, the digital platform of the non-governmental Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD) in which von der Leyen’s mild-mannered speech was juxtaposed against successive scenes of historic and current Israeli violence against Palestinians, thus debunking the myth of "Israel’s" immaculate conception and civilizational exceptionalism as what George Galloway in the context of the US invasion of Iraq once famously called “a pack of lies.”

“Today, we celebrate 75 years of vibrant democracy in the heart of the Middle East, 75 years of dynamism, ingenuity and groundbreaking innovations,” von der Leyen can be seen and heard saying, accompanied by moving and still snapshots of ethnic cleansing campaigns, police brutality, house demolitions, hi-tech surveillance cameras, and the Apartheid wall.

What Borrell and von der Leyen have in common: an anti-racist discourse would consider them both to be textbook racists who are deluded by their internal dialectic between liberal democratic values and white supremacist cultural DNA into believing that they are not racists: hence their jaunty, amicable demeanor while engaging in what is nothing short of hate speech.

But, to continue their analogy, one shouldn’t let oneself be led down the garden path by their smiley-face racism: von der Leyen’s (hate) speech was not a case of negligent white people accidentally saying and doing racist things for which they will later apologize for in a disingenuous fashion (as Borrell ultimately did). No, it was premeditated, her speech was an act committed in full possession of her faculties.

That there was no room for plausible deniability in her case is corroborated by two things: first, the native German’s history of cozying up to the postcolonial colonizer that is "Israel", thus suggesting a pattern to her anti-Palestinian behavior: not even a year ago, von der Leyen traveled to "Israel" to receive an honorary doctorate from Ben Gurion University where she gave an acceptance speech that Canadian journalist Andrew Mitrovica described as a “fulsome expression to her blind, unqualified support and affection for Israel.”

Second, her reaction to the criticism of her (hate) speech: instead of showing remorse, she did what liberal democratic racists do best: deny and gaslight. Addressing the critics, a spokesperson for Frau von der Leyen described an official Palestinian complaint as an “inappropriate statement” and “unacceptable reaction”, thus downplaying the severity of the matter and deflecting from one’s own culpability by engaging in victim-blaming.

Not only was von der Leyen’s erasure of the Nakba from her speech anti-factual and ahistorical, but her plant-based analogy was also particularly cruel given "Israel’s" systematic destruction of Palestinian olive trees. This is done not only to rob Palestinians of their economic livelihoods but also to lower their morale, as Palestinians view them as a symbol of resistance and resilience.

Adding to the audacity of von der Leyen’s Nakba denialism is the hypocrisy of the overall context in which it occurred: over the last few years, her native Germany has had no problem with officially designating Armenians, Yazidis, and even Ukrainians as victims of genocide.

Yet, the application of equal measure to Palestinians remains elusive as ever, even though what "Israel" has been doing to them since 1948 is, by the yardstick of the West’s own legal definition of genocide as codified in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and which consists of five diagnostic criteria that Israel has all fulfilled, exactly that: genocide.

Von der Leyen’s Nakba denialism is part of a broader discursive end game: the pro-"Israel" West’s dadaist attempt to erase Palestinians from their own history. Listening to her cringeworthy "Israel"- adoring video fluff piece, one might be tempted to think that attempt is dangerously close to becoming reality.

But the media, social media, and civil society backlash to her banality of denial has shown that it is not only armed Palestinian Resistance that is flourishing under ever-worsening circumstances. If anyone is a flower in the desert, it is the Palestinian people with their legitimate aspirations of freedom, peace, and prosperity on their own land, and not the repressive settler colonial entity on the wrong side of history and morality that continues to deny them their basic human rights.