The EU still has no guts when it comes to Israel

In a sign of mounting pressure on European leaders over Israel’s violence in occupied Palestinian territories and beyond, more than a million EU citizens have called for suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement via a European Citizens' Initiative — a mechanism that, having passed the threshold, obliged the bloc to consider it.

Too bad the predominant elite voices in the EU are quashing it, a hypocrisy that grows by the day.

Over 350 former diplomats, 60 NGOs, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and a UN Special Rapporteur have endorsed the proposal to break the EU-Israel pact, reminding EU ministers of their obligation to "employ all reasonable means to prevent genocide."

The agreement, which came into effect in 2000, is the framework for the EU-Israel relations. It grants Israel preferential access to EU markets. That’s meaningful since the EU is collectively Israel’s main trading partner, accounting for 32% of Israel’s total trade, with 28% of Israel’s exports going to the EU. The agreement also provides for cooperation in other key areas, such as diplomatic dialogue and research.

The pact also enables Israel’s participation in the EU-funded Horizon program on research and innovation, which made a total of 1.11 billion euros available for Israeli companies, universities, and public organizations until 2027. Rights groups fear that some of these funds could be spent on dual-use technologies facilitating militarization, repression, and surveillance.

Like similar EU agreements with third countries, the deal with Israel includes a human rights clause, namely Article 2, which stipulates that “cooperation is based on respect for human rights and democratic principles”.

It is based on this clause that Spain, Slovenia, and Ireland proposed to suspend the agreement. On April 21, EU foreign ministers met in Luxembourg to discuss that proposal. Yet they failed to adopt the measure.

In a joint letter to the EU high representative on foreign policy Kaja Kallas, the foreign ministers of the three countries pointed to concrete breaches of Article 2 of the agreement.

The letter cited a recently passed Israeli law imposing the death penalty on Palestinians convicted in military courts, the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, and settler violence in the West Bank carried out with reported impunity. The letter also pointed to “recurrent attacks against religious freedom of Muslims and Christians that challenge the status-quo of the Holy Land.” And on Lebanon, the foreign ministers noted that Israeli military operations there were carried out with “absolute disregard of international law and international humanitarian law.”

The countries’ representatives also reminded Kallas that an earlier review of Israeli compliance conducted by the European External Action Service by June 2025 clearly established that Israel was in breach of its obligations under the agreement with the EU, and that the situation “has only deteriorated” since the review was conducted.

The evidence of systematic violations in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon is not ambiguous.

By any measure, the next logical step should have been a suspension of the agreement.

The Spanish foreign minister Jose Manuel Albares has warned that the “EU risks losing credibility if it fails to apply the same principles to Israel’s perpetual war in the Middle East as it does to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine”.

And yet, Germany and Italy blocked any suspension.

Germany's foreign minister Johann Wadephul called the proposal "inappropriate," insisting on more "critical, constructive dialogue" with Israel.

His Italian counterpart, Antonio Tajani, likewise opposed the push and said that the idea of suspension is definitely shelved. There was some hope that Italy would swing, as in recent weeks it suspended a defense agreement with Israel – largely a symbolic move to address the public’s increasingly critical view of Israel’s wars. Italy also protested Israeli Defense Forces’ warning shots against the Italian contingent in the framework of UNIFIL in Lebanon.

Yet in the end Rome sided with Berlin, not Madrid, allowing instead future individual sanctions against the extremist settlers.

This outcome underscores the EU’s divisions over Israel. Opponents of the suspension in Berlin, Rome, Vienna, and Prague argue that it would be a political act, not a legal one — disruptive, perhaps counterproductive. Their logic is that it’s better to exhaust dialogue and to pressure Israel from within the framework rather than to blow it up.

But this argument collapses under its own weight. Article 2 is not a preamble aspiration — it is a binding condition. Once the EU review found Israel to be in breach, following the agreement means enforcing its terms, not indefinitely ignoring them.

The hypocrisy could not be starker. The same European capitals that rushed to sanction Russia within days of its invasion of Ukraine have now spent years finding excuses not to act against Israel. Sanctions on Moscow were swift, sweeping, and celebrated as a defense of “the rules-based international order.”

When it comes to Tel Aviv, however, what we see is procedural procrastination as if the matter to be decided on is some routine trade dispute rather than accusations of an ongoing genocide. No one argues for the dialogue with Tel Aviv to be severed, but it is not supposed to be a substitute for accountability — it certainly wasn’t in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

And if anything, it has now become abundantly clear that, absent real pressure, Israel, under Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, will not change its behavior.

The message the EU is sending is unmistakable: some violations are intolerable; others are merely unfortunate. The more Israel escalates — in Gaza, West Bank, Lebanon, Iran — the more the EU’s deference to Tel Aviv underscores the deeply unhealthy nature of this relationship.

As if to underscore this surreal disconnect, on the very same day that EU ministers failed to take any meaningful action against Israel, Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission’s president, was speaking elsewhere about the urgent need to protect Europe from "Russian, Chinese and Turkish influence." Not a word about Israeli influence — even though only few weeks ago a documented attempt to meddle in Slovenian elections by Israeli operatives was denounced by the Slovenian government.

The EU Commission president can identify geopolitical threats from Ankara and Beijing, but not from a state actively breaching the human rights clause of its own trade agreement with Europe and interfering in a member state’s elections. Of note, the warning about Turkish influence came, by sheer coincidence of timing, as Israel has been intensifying its political campaign against Turkey.

Whether von der Leyen noticed the irony is unknowable. Whether she would care is another matter.