[Python] Localize time zone based on column in pandas

I am trying to assign a timezone to a datetime column, based on another column containing the time zone.

Example data:

DATETIME VALUE TIME_ZONE
0 2021-05-01 00:00:00 1.00 Europe/Athens
1 2021-05-01 00:00:00 2.13 Europe/London
2 2021-05-01 00:00:00 5.13 Europe/London
3 2021-05-01 01:00:00 4.25 Europe/Dublin
4 2021-05-01 01:00:00 4.25 Europe/Paris


I am trying to assign a time zone to the DATETIME column, but using the tz_localize method, I cannot avoid using an apply call, which will be very slow on my large dataset. Is there some way to do this without using apply?

What I have now (which is slow):

df['DATETIME_WITH_TZ'] = df.apply(lambda row: row['DATETIME'].tz_localize(row['TIME_ZONE']), axis=1)

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