We analysed in detail more than 50 speeches by Ursula von der Leyen that touched upon the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine conflicts. We were interested in uncovering how the political subjectivity of Ukrainians is constructed in comparison to that of Palestinians, paying particular attention to the role of gender.
Alvaro Oleart
In 2019, Ursula von der Leyen became the first-ever female president of the European Commission, and her attempt to lead a gender-balanced College of Commissioners raised some hopes among progressive actors.
However, behind the first female commission president and the EU’s (empty) ‘united in diversity’ motto, there are gendered, racialised, and colonial logics that are not only Europe’s past but also its present.
Racism is structurally embedded in EU institutions, as EUobserver’s Shada Islam has consistently argued.
Nowhere is this more evident than in the European Commission’s continued support for Israel, particularly in the aftermath of the 7 October Hamas-led attacks.
Together with Lucrecia Rubio Grundell and Juan Roch, we have just published an academic article where we analysed in detail more than 50 speeches by von der Leyen that touched upon the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine conflicts.
We were interested in uncovering how the political subjectivity of Ukrainians is constructed in comparison to that of Palestinians, paying particular attention to the role of gender.
Our findings are heartbreaking.
On one hand, von der Leyen frequently praises Ukrainian women as ‘unseen heroes, working tirelessly behind the scenes’ and as having ‘a prominent role’ in the conflict ‘as leaders in political roles, as soldiers, as teachers and guardians’.
She even enacted the symbolic recognition of the political agency of Ukrainian women by inviting Ukrainian first lady Olena Zelenska as a guest of honour in her 2022 State of the Union address.
‘Not even mentioned’
Instead, Palestinian women are denied political agency in an extreme way, in that they are not even mentioned by von der Leyen.
This reproduces the silencing that has accompanied much of Palestinian women’s resistance, as Palestine is securitised and equated with ‘terrorism’, following a very gendered and racialised logic.
For instance, on 19 October 2023, von der Leyen delivered a speech where she argued:
“There was no limit to the blood Hamas terrorists wanted to spill. (…) These terrorists, supported by their friends in Tehran, will never stop. And so, Israel has the right to defend itself in line with humanitarian law. (…) We stand with Israel”.
This speech captures von der Leyen’s position, which mostly reduces Palestinians to “Hamas”.
Palestinians are depicted as enduring a ‘humanitarian crisis’ for which only Hamas is presented as responsible, as if Israel’s aggression is a sort of natural disaster.
Palestinians are thus conceived, at best, as the recipients of (conditional) humanitarian aid or, at worst, as the legitimate targets of violence.
Von der Leyen cited in Israel’s genocide defence
The speech also shows von der Leyen’s international relevance: this specific speech was cited on 12 January 2024, by Malcolm Shaw, the British lawyer representing Israel in the case filed by South Africa before the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The speeches are also interesting from what they omit.
Notably, von der Leyen sidelines any reference to Israel’s apartheid, occupation and settler-colonialism, widely documented by Amnesty International, B’Tselem, or UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese.
Hence, von der Leyen’s position is rooted in a colonial conception of ‘Europe’ that situates Israel as part of it, while dehumanising Palestinians, an extreme form of ‘othering’ that negates both their political agency and status as a political community.
This logic is reinforced by von der Leyen’s common reference to Palestine exclusively in territorial terms such as ‘Gaza’.
The role of gender is crucial to dehumanise Palestinians. In the context of being awarded an honorary doctorate by the Israeli Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, von der Leyen argued that:
“Europe and Israel are bound to be friends and allies. Because the history of Europe is the history of the Jewish people. Europe is Simone Veil and Hannah Arendt […] You have become a prosperous nation, even in the most challenging of circumstances and in a complicated region. You championed women’s rights in unlikely times, and Golda Meir’s leadership inspired women across the world. Me, as a young girl, too.”
Here, von der Leyen’s is reproducing Israel’s longstanding pinkwashing strategies.
This is most evident in how von der Leyen reclaims Golda Meir as a champion of women’s rights when, as prime minister of Israel (1969–1974), she recurrently dehumanised Palestinians to the point of negating their very existence.
Indeed, in an interview with the Sunday Times in June 1969, Meir said:
“There were no such things as Palestinians … It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them … They did not exist”.
Von der Leyen’s championing of Meir as a feminist icon is a powerful demonstration of how pinkwashing and historical erasure operate together – the 1948 Nakba is “forgotten”.
The double standards we identify empirically in the article exemplify not only the inconsistent logic of EU approaches to international law and human rights, but also the underlying logic upon which such inconsistency is built.
Namely, this logic rests on a racialised and colonial hierarchy that creates a stark separation between those communities that ‘deserve’ to be protected (Ukraine, Israel) and those that do not (Palestine).
The US-Israel attacks on Iran, and the Israeli offensive on Lebanon reproduce the same logic: the commission is unable to identify the aggressors and stand in solidarity with Palestinian, Lebanese and Iranian communities.
We are all equals, but some more than others.
Fortunately, there are some good news.
Resistance and solidarity is mounting across the world, including in Brussels and within EU institutions, as the emergence of EU Staff for Peace highlights.
The Justice for Palestine European Citizens’ Initiative, which demands demand the full suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, has already gathered more than a million signatures.
More contestation will be needed to challenge EU leaders’ support of Israel’s genocidal aggression against Palestine.
Resistance is not futile.
