Europe's response to the war in Gaza cannot be read without putting it into context of the

previous response to the war in Ukraine and indeed Joe Biden's election.

Like if the war in Gaza happened in 2017 with Trump as president, my

sense is your response would be much more of a ruckus reaction, much more

contest and conflict, different dimensions, the left would have had a different reaction, people

would have split, you know, it would have been a big political issue.

It wouldn't have been Ursula von der Leyen coming out and just projecting the Israeli flag

onto the European Commission as if that were something that was a pre-established consensus.

I mean, it cannot be answered, I think, without a broader framing of the loss of the kind of anti-systemic or even

rebellious approach to geopolitical

or political economic questions.

I think what's really impressive about the Ukraine war is its effect in

producing a kind of war-like rhetoric across the political spectrum and in fact

probably promoted more by Greens and Social Democrats than by actual right-wingers, where you have all this kind of talk of like society needs to be ready for war, our civilization is under threat, this kind of weird sort of projected or proxy celebration of the values of military preparedness and the struggle fought by Ukraine,

which is now allied with this like unconditional support for Israel and

presentation of you know Muslims as an enemy within and everything is

kind of threatened and Israel somehow sort of stands as a sort of representation of the West defending itself.

So there's like this kind of proxy obsession with military defense and so on which the Ukraine war certainly

certainly accelerated. I think that what is most remarkable and most worth

emphasizing about the conjunter of European politics is the way in which the security question as a vector for civilizational politics has become so dominant

Even as a lot of the most controversial policies remain in place, You know there's all sorts of

scandalous aspects of European politics which are not just to do with the

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