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All Talk, No Action: The EU’s Abject Failure, Once Again, to Correct Course On Israel

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“Some of the most senior figures in the Brussels bureaucracy have no red lines. They just have red carpets, which they roll out whenever Israel’s advocates ask them to do so.”

In recent months, European governments have ratcheted up their public criticism of Israel’s criminal actions, as the fallout of the war it began with the US in West Asia threatens to upend the global economy. There have even been murmurs of disquiet from the government of Germany, Israel’s biggest benefactor and long-time protector in the region.

“Regarding Iran, yes, I’ve become disillusioned,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz told a press conference in Berlin regarding the US’ lack of an “exit strategy” and resulting “humiliation” at the hands of Iran. “The US and Israel assumed, right from the start, that this problem would be resolved within a few days, and we now have to acknowledge that it isn’t”.

The remarks come just after a week after Merz voiced reservations over Israel’s escalation of illegal settlement expansions in the West Bank. After a telephone conversation with Benjamin Netanhayu, Merz’s spokesman Stefan Kornelius sent out a press release:

“In the conversation, the chancellor expressed his deep concern about developments in the Palestinian territories. There must be no de facto partial annexation of the West Bank.”

Even this mildest of ticking offs was enough to elicit a blistering rejoinder from Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich:

Days later, Berlin was already busy making amends…

On the surface, relations between Europe and Israel have never been as strained as they are today, especially now that Netanyahu’s close friend, Hungarian President Viktor Orban, has left the picture. Meanwhile, over a million EU citizens have signed a petition calling for the suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement via a European Citizens’ Initiative, which was enough to force the EU Council to at least consider the proposal.

“Israel is losing its last friends in Europe as diplomatic collapse deepens across the continent”, warns Itamar Eichner for Ynet Global, the English language edition of Israel’s largest news website:

Even Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a close friend of Israel, has decided to downgrade a security and defense agreement with Jerusalem.

Other countries such as France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovenia and others were lost to us long ago. We are now in a unique situation, one we have never faced before, in which almost every European country is expressing very harsh public criticism of the State of Israel. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said today, in response to Spain’s removal from the joint headquarters in Kiryat Gat, that “international law is currently being fundamentally violated by one state, and that is the government of Israel.” The same Sanchez only this week reopened Spain’s embassy in Tehran, while Spain has no ambassador in Israel.

The last fortress was Hungary, and that fortress fell on Sunday. New Prime Minister Peter Magyar has already said he will examine every decision regarding Israel on its own merits and has no interest in continuing the policy pursued by his predecessor, Viktor Orban.

Yet when the EU was given the chance to finally turn years of empty words and promises into real, meanginful action last week, it chickened out.

The governments of Spain, Slovenia and Ireland had proposed to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement. More than 350 former diplomats, 60 NGOs and a UN Special Rapporteur had also endorsed the proposal to suspend the agreement, reminding EU ministers of their obligation to “employ all reasonable means to prevent genocide” — particularly now that Israel’s genocidal actions are now being applied to southern Lebanon.

The association agreement, now in its 26th year of existence, is the framework for EU-Israel relations, granting Israel preferential access to EU markets, writes Brussels-based foreign policy analyst Eldar Mamedov for the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft:

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.

Even the EU Commission itself concluded last year that Israel may be in breach of the deal’s human rights clause, namely Article 2, which stipulates that “cooperation is based on respect for human rights and democratic principles”. The arguments in favour of suspending the association agreement are overwhelming, explains Mamedov:

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.

But that’s not what happened. Instead, Germany and Italy blocked any suspension, with Germany’s foreign minister Johann Wadephul calling the proposal “inappropriate” and insisting on more “critical, constructive dialogue” with Israel. His Italian counterpart, Antonio Tajani, said the idea of suspension has been shelved.

The argument used to justify yet more inaction against Israel’s serial war crimes was that it is 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, Mamedov notes:

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.

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.

UN Special Rapporteur to Palestine Francesca Albanese puts in in starker terms: markets are more important than lives. This brings to mind Lambert’s classic two rules of neoliberalism: Rule #1: Because markets. Rule #2: Go die!

The Spanish foreign minister Jose Manuel Albares cautioned 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”.

For the record, Russia last week was subject to its 20th round of EU sanctions. By contrast, the EU has is still yet impose sanctions on Israeli settlements in the region, which it has been promising to do for years. Also, as reader DJG Reality Star points out in the comments below, Albares’ reference to “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine” leaves out some key historic elements:

NATO expansion? Minsk I, Minsk II? The OCSE reports documenting the Kiev government’s blind eye toward right-wing militias sent into the Donbass to engage in torture, murder, and confiscation of churches? Victoria and cookies and “Fuck the EU”?

Nonetheless, the EU’s embarrassingly underqualified chief diplomat, Kaja Kallas, would still beg to differ with Albares on the EU’s loss of credibility over Israel. Last week, she claimed that the EU had been the strongest supporter of the Palestinian people in the world — just a day before EU foreign ministers once again declined to hold Israel accountable for its genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.

The day after that, Kallas’ disconnect with reality seemingly grew even larger as she claimed that the EU’s international credibility was actually rising under her expert stewardship:

In the past week, Kallas’ boss, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, has further burnished the EU’s international credibility by warning about the need to protect Europe from the influence not just of Russia and China but also NATO partner Türkiye (/s) — coincidentally, just weeks after former Israeli premier Naftali Bennett, who is hotly tipped to replace Netanyahu, described Türkiye as the “next Iran”.

Not only do VdL and Kallas seem intent on destroying the bloc’s relations with all three of the world’s superpowers, at the same time (see below), but they also seem to continue to be getting many of their prompts from Tel Aviv:

As VdL warns about the malign influence of China, Russia and Türkiye on Europe, not a word has been said about Israeli’s undue influence — despite a documented attempt just weeks ago by Israeli operatives to meddle in Slovenian elections. A new exposé by the Electronic Infitada’s David Cronin reveals that Israeli influence over EU policy is, if anything, greater than feared:

A document I obtained through a freedom of information request illustrates that more than two years after the Gaza genocide began, the Israel lobby is still writing the script which key Brussels officials follow.

Hélène Le Gal, head of the Middle East division in the EU’s diplomatic service, appears particularly willing to have the script written for her.

The document shows that Le Gal has agreed to be a host of a “strategic dialogue” organized jointly by the diplomatic service and the pro-Israel group called the European Leadership Network (Elnet). Scheduled for 12-13 May, the event will feature “30 high-level policy and opinion makers – 15 from the EU and 15 from Israel,” says the invitation for the event

The discussions at the May event will be “entirely” off-the-record, the invitation says. As usual, the public must be kept in the dark about matters of demonstrable public interest…

Cronin closes off with the observation that while some of the most senior figures in the Brussels bureaucracy have no red lines, they do have red carpets, which they unfurl whenever Israel’s advocates ask them to do so.

Helping Israel commit the worst of war crimes doesn’t stop the EU from trying to hold the moral high ground, however, by: a) intensifying its public criticism of Israel’s excesses, while b) shining a massive spotlight on the tiny little material support it provides to Palestine’s brutalised land and people. As Francesca Albanese points out below, such posturing is “simply unsufferable”.

Lastly, it would be darkly ironic, and would speak volumes about the EU’s real foreign policy objectives, if the first EU sanctions ever imposed on Israel are over a boatload of grain that was allegedly stolen from Ukraine as opposed to the thousands of Palestinian children massacred by Israel’s war machine.

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21 comments

  1. DJG, Reality Czar

    Thanks for this roundup of moral decay. At this point, listening to Kaja Kallas talk about matters of war and peace is like watching a fish try to describe a bicycle.

    Noting: What happened in Italy is that the automatic renewal of an agreement in effect for twenty years was suspended. This means that the agreement is in legal limbo. Meloni and her government have been accused of engaging in pure cosmetics. The proof is that Tajani went and kept the EU association agreement in place. (The man just loves to be humiliated, as the current saga with Marina Berlù indicates…)

    https://www.rainews.it/articoli/2026/04/meloni-abbiamo-deciso-di-sospendere-rinnovo-automatico-dellaccordo-di-difesa-con-israele-be764802-bcf6-4946-a519-c91618832572.html

    “è stato solo temporaneamente sospeso l’automatismo della cooperazione fattiva.”

    I will also like to attack ye old worn-out “who is the aggressor?” bullshit:

    Oh?

    The Spanish foreign minister Jose Manuel Albares cautioned 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”.

    NATO expansion? Minsk I, Minsk II? The OCSE reports documenting the Kiev government’s blind eye toward right-wing militias sent into the Donbass to engage in torture, murder, and confiscation of churches? Victoria and cookies and “Fuck the EU”?

    Credibility? After Yugoslavia and Libya? Or maybe I just don’t get the Spanish sense of humor.

    1. Nick Corbishley Post author

      It’s not humour, I’m afraid. It’s just the traditional lens through which most NATO members view the Ukraine conflict. The Pedro Sánchez government may also be trying to counterbalance its opposition to the war in Iran and the genocide in Israel in a desperate bid to please its fellow NATO members, in particular the US of A.

      Since refusing to allow the US to use its joint military bases in Spain, Madrid has faced the (almost certainly empty) threat of being evicted from NATO by the Trump administration, as well as the much more real threat of Israel (and quite possibly the US) helping Morocco reclaim its former northern territories of Ceuta and Melilla from the Spanish. As the subheading of an op-ed in Ynet Global reads, “US-Spain tensions over NATO, Iran create opening for Morocco to press claims on Ceuta and Melilla, with Israel positioned to back Rabat diplomatically within US-led alliance that increasingly favors cooperative partners over European holdouts. Also, a report in El Mundo suggests that Spain’s economy minister has been excluded from G20 discussions on the global economy taking place in Washington. In other words, payback appears to have already begun.

      That said, DJG, you’re quite right to point out the glaring holes in Albares’ version of events in Ukraine, and, if you don’t mind, have hoisted the pertinent part your comment into the post.

      1. AG

        “helping Morocco reclaim its former northern territories of Ceuta and Melilla”
        That is very interesting, thanks.
        That of course would touch on EU´s very own geopolitical agenda re: deportations.
        On the other hand EU has almost zero means to enforce anything.
        Or does it?

  2. Rui

    People like Francesca Albanese will never publicly say the Palestinians have a right to armed resistance. She also followed the script on Iran. They simply serve as escape valves for building anger and frustration.

    1. JonnyJames

      On the other hand, Francesca does point out many inconvenient facts that are largely absent in western public discourse. I would much rather have her speak than listen to the lies and hypocrisy of Ursula. Even though she does not come out and say she supports Hamas and Hezbollah, she is still persecuted for speaking facts.

      2. Rui

        I agree albeit those facts didn’t really help the Palestinians while we do feel better she is saying them. She is courageous but she also, and this is my personal belief, does not truly see Palestinians as equals, only as victims. When I saw her go after the Iranian authorities over some made up killed numbers the charade dropped. She was attacking the only country but Houthi Yemen standing up to Israel. She would rather Palestinians die than the resistance saves them. Palestinians are to die passively, to our horror, but never to defy us.
        I don’t know, that is how I see it.

  3. The Rev Kev

    At this stage I am more than willing to believe that the main reason that the EU keeps on giving Israel a free pass is that they want their surveillance & suppression technology to implement in the EU itself as it becomes more authoritarian. It will certainly be needed as more and more power is transferred from the member States to an unaccountable Brussels leading to widespread discontent. And who else has more experience in spying on populations and taking measures to mow the grass than the Israelis?

  4. Henry Moon Pie

    “like watching a fish try to describe a bicycle”

    I think you’re underestimating our piscine brethren. Watch this bass. He can even carry a tune.

  5. Ignacio

    Well Nick, thank you for this review on recent ‘lack of action’ by the Europeans. This, lack of action, looks trend in the foreseeable future in the old-fashioned Neoliberal Europe. Don’t you notice a contradiction there? Notice how they were the Meloni government and Merz’s the ones friendliest with genocidal Netanyahoo. Meloni labelled as “far right” should be better qualified as Neoliberal “canaglia” or “senza vergogna” variant and Merz, supposedly traditional conservative Neoliberal, is trying himself to turn canaglia in order to avoid loosing votes to AfD. This does not work and Merz is inevitably unpopular. Any Neoliberal European government, no matter the flavour, is poised to loose popularity once they put on the helmet as we are seeing once and again in every country. Precisely because lack of action. Unsurprising to see how Zionism prevails in the most rancid of the Neoliberal currents.

    1. vao

      Meloni started her political career in the neo-fascist MSI party — ideologically white-washing the “good aspects” of Mussolini’s regime, which persecuted Jews. One of Merz’s grandfathers pursued his political career (mayor of a German town) as an enthusiastic member of the NSDAP; he was previously a centrist. Merz evoked his memory when campaigning against an attempt by the SPD to take over the town which the said grandfather had ruled for so long. The families of von der Leyen, Habeck, and Baerbock had some prominent, high-ranking NSDAP officials. To my knowledge, none of these German politicians ever publicly and forcefully repudiated their criminal ancestors. Orban’s entourage comprises a number of avowedly antisemitic ideologues. Macron is an admirer of Pétain, whose regime issued more than 60 antisemitic laws and edicts.

      We could go on.

      I continue to think that those people who so demonstratively “stand with Israel” are fundamentally hypocritical antisemites who want to keep the Jews away their own countries. And if a lot of Arabs and other Muslims get slaughtered in the process, so much the better, because they hate them at least as much as the Jews — they just can afford to do it more openly.

  6. Carolinian

    Maybe those EU leaders are worried about being assassinated. It’s Bibi’s all purpose solution.

    And of course the hypocrisy, it burns. For decades our WW2 narrative has contended that war was all about Munich and appeasement. Then there’s the Holocaust narrative that contends the Allies knew about the death camps and did nothing to intervene. Of course to many in the West’s ruling upper middle class the horror of the Holocaust was that it was done to people like them whereas dealing death to the mere natives (as they imagine Palestinians to be) has been Europe’s chosen course for centuries.

    It’s always a class war in the end–arguably.

  7. vao

    “EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, has further burnished the EU’s international credibility by warning about the need to protect Europe”

    I presume you meant blemish, not burnish (or perhaps you are being ironical).

  8. Noirette

    The EU, in the shape of VDL and Kallas (non-elected via dodgy structures, with VDL anointing Kallas, to make it short) belong to what they and their tribe imagine to be a ‘supremacist’ class, with honors! Top ‘o the Top! Best Leaders!

    This mindset includes clinging to a shaky hierarchical structure, with extending power (of some flavor) as a priority, and appropriating, along the way, some upping of personal fame and fortune. — It is like jockeying in a Corporate like-structure, and has nothing to with National priorities of any kind.

    Which entails subservience to the USA, to its ‘occupied – controlled’ territories in the ME. ISR in first place as a disruptor, de-stabilizer, landing place, Arab-killing, proxy — but with the Gulfies not far behind, all to keep strife going, the oil flowing, and domination intact.

    All that is now splintering and the EU is becoming defunct like NATO, the skeletons structures are held up for some time.

  9. Lefty Godot

    It’s all about those “Samson Option” Israeli nukes targeting European capitals. Israel’s existence is predicated on extortion, blackmail, bribery, and lies on a colossal scale. If Western Civilization is a cancer eating up the resources of the planet until nothing is left, Israel is the cancer within the cancer, accelerating the death spiral.

  10. Balan Aroxdale

    European states will be drafting their citizens to fight Israel’s wars soon. They will say it’s to fight Russia, but rest assured the deployments will all to the Caspian.

  11. veronius

    Kaja Kallas “embarrassingly underqualified” to be a senior diplomat? I beg to differ. When the main – nay, only – qualification for a ‘diplomatic’ posting is hatred of Russia, Kallas is a star candidate. Diplomacy is a dead art/science in the West. You almost long for the days of George Kennan. Arch Cold Warrior that he was, he at least understood the importance of trying to see things from the point of view of one’s adversary. These days, doing that is denounced as treason.

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