“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 the EU’s 20th round of EU sanctions since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. By contrast, the EU has failed to even impose sanctions on Israeli settlements in the region, which it has been promising to do for years…
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Nick Corbishley 