Gaza, gas and EU politics

From the very beginning, the Czech presidency had to deal with the burden of „2G“ – the two crises: Gaza and gas. The bombing of Israel and the couner strike in the Gaza strip, as well as the interrupted supplies of Russian gas via Ukraine required an immediate reaction.

In both cases, the Czech presidency, together with the European Commission and backed by EU countries, launched diplomatic missions in the Middle East and in Kiev and Moscow. The rapid reaction of the Czech government was to a great extent enabled not only by its geographical location and historical experience, but also by the main presidency priority – we have called energy security a top priority long before 1 January despite the fact that some described our concerns about Europe's vulnerability in its dependance on imported energy sources as exaggerated. Likewise, in our plan to redefine the relation with Israel, we pointed out that the EU's role in the Middle East process has to be more important than just being „a big payer, but not a big player“.

Impact on EU

So if anybody questioned the meaning of the Czech presidency's priorities a month ago, now he himself has to regard them as key issues for the whole European Union. Today it is obvious that we did not criticise the dependance on a single source of energy raw materials just with respect to our own experience and that we did not call…