For the last 20 months, the European Union has had no policy or even a joint position on Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the extermination of its population. Some member states like Germany have doubled down on their support for Israel and increased weapons supplies and even backed Israel in the genocide case brought against it by South Africa in the International Court of Justice. Others like Ireland and Spain have been more critical of Israel. But the lack of consensus has paralysed the EU.
Yet in recent days as much Western opinion seems to be turning against Israel. Many of those who have been silent for 20 months have suddenly expressed outrage at its actions, and the EU has also finally begun to shift. On 20 May, high representative Kaja Kallas announced that the EU would review the terms of its association agreement with Israel. But even now, divisions between member states mean there is little chance the review will lead to meaningful collective action against Israel.
Since Kallas, a former Estonian prime minister, took over as the EU’s foreign minister when the new European Commission was formed last year, she has had almost nothing to say about Gaza even as she constantly expresses outrage about Russian actions in Ukraine – the only issue about which she appears to really care. But this month she was finally forced to act by 17 of the bloc’s 27 member states who demanded that the European Commission review the association agreement.
“It is clear from today’s discussions that there is a strong majority in favour of a review of Article 2 of our Association Agreement with Israel,” Kallas told reporters in Brussels after a meeting of member state foreign ministers. Article 2 of the agreement, which came into force in 2000 and mostly covers economic relations, states that it is “based on respect for human rights and democratic principles”.
The Irish and Spanish prime ministers had already called for an “urgent review” of the association agreement last February. But European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who as a German Christian Democrat is also an uncritical supporter of Israel, simply ignored their demand. During the last few weeks, however, Dutch foreign minister Caspar Veldkamp has assembled a coalition of member states behind a new demand for a review, which has now forced her hand.
(It is striking that it is Veldkamp – a minister in a coalition government which includes the far-right Freedom Party led by Geert Wilders – was the driving force. Wilders has an Israeli flag in his office alongside the Dutch flag and sees Israel as the West’s first line of defence in a civilisational war with Islam.)
Von der Leyen will now have to review the agreement, though the timeline is unclear. But even though Israel’s human rights violations have been exhaustively documented – not least by the EU’s own special representative for human rights – the EU’s labyrinthine decision-making process means that the review is still unlikely to lead to significant action.
A full suspension of the association agreement is all but impossible because it would require unanimity among member states. Elements of the agreement could be suspended with a qualified majority, but this would be difficult. Much depends on Germany, the largest EU member state, which opposed the review of the association agreement altogether. The new chancellor Friedrich Merz has expressed “concern” about the situation in Gaza and urged Israel to allow aid supplies in but, unlike France and the UK, has stopped short of threatening to take concrete action.
The “action plan” – which implements the association agreement and aims to further develop relations between the EU and Israel – is also currently up for renewal and, because it too requires unanimity, it is possible for one member state could refuse to sign off it and block it. Veldkamp has suggested that the Netherlands might be prepared to do just that. But even this would likely have little impact on cooperation between EU and Israel – and nothing the EU could do would affect weapons supplies, the flow of which are up to member states.
What makes the EU’s failure to take meaningful action during the last 20 months so glaring is that Israel is exactly the kind of country that the EU ought to be able to influence. It is a small country in what the EU likes to call its “neighbourhood”, and the EU is its largest trading partner. The EU uses tough conditionality to push around similar countries – but not Israel.
Moreover, the whole idea of a common European foreign policy goes back to Europe’s attempts to develop a joint approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict in the 1970s. These efforts culminated in the Venice Declaration of 1980, which acknowledged a Palestinian right to self-government and went further than the United States was willing to go in recognising the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). After the end of the Cold War, EU member states supported the two-state solution; but, as successive Israeli governments have moved to the right in the last 25 years, the consensus between EU member states has fallen apart.
Speaking after the meeting at which the review of the association agreement was announced, the new German foreign minister, Johann Wadephul, simply ignored the decision. Instead, he talked up the latest round of sanctions the EU had agreed to impose on Russia, as if Gaza didn’t exist: “As Europeans, as the European Union, we again showed that we can act, we want to act, for the benefit of our freedom. We care about conflicts in our neighbourhood – and we are united.”
[See also: Even Peter Mandelson thinks globalisation is dead]
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