EU-Israel: Change of discourse, not of policies

Twenty months after the October 7, 2023, massacre by Hamas, Israel's "right to self-defense" no longer covers everything. Political unrest is beginning to bite into Europe. After more than 53,000 dead, 120,000 injured, and more than 60% of Gaza's buildings destroyed, the EU can no longer look the other way. The intensification of Israeli bombing of the Strip also comes after Donald Trump's tour of the Middle East, with an agenda more burdened with commercial (and family) interests than with setting limits on the annihilation of the Gazans, and is accompanied by an increasingly unashamed extremist stance within Benjamin Netanyahu's government.

In recent weeks, almost daily evacuation orders have called for the evacuation of southern Gaza, bombing of civilians and infrastructure has intensified, starvation is being used as a weapon of war, and the occupation of territories with a will to conquer has become a target of far-right activist Bezalel Smotrich.

The war in Gaza is now an ethnic cleansing operation that makes the silent connivance of a significant portion of the West unsustainable. Last week, the European Commission announced that it will review the EU-Israel Association Agreement, a free trade pact that regulates political and economic relations between the two sides. This symbolic shift still faces explicit opposition from a dozen EU countries, including Germany, Italy, Greece, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Sweden proposed imposing targeted sanctions against members of the Israeli government, and Spain, France, and Belgium continue to call for greater forcefulness from the Union. The EU is Israel's main trading partner, worth over €45 billion annually, and this remains unchanged. No sanctions are currently planned. Last week's decision means that the Brussels government will now open an investigation to determine whether Israel has violated the human rights obligations enshrined in Article 2 of the Association Agreement, in force since 2000. As if the evidence of these violations weren't already clear enough.

In recent days, the United Kingdom, France, and Canada have also issued statements calling for a halt to Israeli military operations, describing the human suffering in Gaza as intolerable and stressing that the forced displacement of people is contrary to international humanitarian law. However, they also reserve the right to take action, including sanctions, for a later date. Benjamin Netanyahu's response has been to accuse the governments of London, Paris, and Ottawa of costing Hamas.

The new EU rhetoric speaks of "disproportionate" and "morally unjustifiable" actions, but above all, it speaks volumes. European diplomacy, increasingly weakened, a victim of the double standards dictated by the EU-27's reaction in Ukraine and Gaza, budget cuts, and Ursula von der Leyen's relentless strategy to concentrate power and representation in the Commission, is struggling to find its own space in any negotiating scenario.

In this context, tensions have been mounting, even within the European institutions themselves. A year ago, more than 1,500 officials from the European Commission, the European Parliament, and several EU agencies signed a letter accusing the Union of apathy toward the plight of the Palestinians. Since then, their minority but constant presence has been a daily reminder, outside the institutions, of what they consider a European failure resulting from inaction and a lack of influence to improve the situation on the ground. Now, two thousand officials have sent a new letter of protest to the institutions, denouncing that the review of the trade agreement falls short and comes "devastatingly late." They are demanding a halt to arms supplies to Israel and more explicit support for the work of the International Criminal Court.

In recent hours, even Germany has begun to move. The new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has warned that Israel "is overstepping its bounds" and that these latest attacks on civilians "can no longer be justified as a fight against terrorism." But Benjamin Netanyahu has been doing away with any notion of limits in the immoderation of a strategy deployed with the certainty of impunity guaranteed until now by the EU. The Europe of words is raising its voice in a conflict in which international organizations, courts, and humanitarian missions have felt increasingly powerless. We must go further.