Poor Josep Borrell. Closing off a quick stint in China on October 14, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy told reporters in Beijing that he had asked Chinese officials not to gauge Europeans “through the lens of our relations with others.” The EU “has become a geopolitical power,” the bloc’s top diplomat insisted, apparently ruffled at the Chinese perception that the twenty-seven-nation body often follows the United States’ lead.

But amid the escalating Israeli-Palestinian crisis, the EU is again falling into line behind Washington, cosigning the United States’ blank check for Israeli “self-defense.” In the aftermath of the horrifying Hamas attack on October 7, when 1,400 Israelis were killed and another two hundred taken as hostages, its solidarity with the people of Israel was to be expected. But that Western support is now turning into a rubber-stamp approval for Israel’s punitive assault on Gazans.

Over three thousand Palestinians — the overwhelming majority civilians — have already been killed in Israeli’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip, prelude to a widely expected ground invasion that risks provoking a broader regional conflict. Hundreds of thousands of Gazans have already been displaced since the Israeli state issued a sudden October 13 order for people to evacuate to the southern half of the coastal enclave, which, nevertheless, is also being bombarded.