The deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza have finally persuaded officials in Brussels to step up their efforts to punish Israel. It’s not likely to help.
On Wednesday, the European Commission will set out detailed proposals for suspending preferential trade terms and sanctioning “extremist” ministers and violent Israeli settlers.
The timing of the announcement is critical. It comes just 24 hours after a United Nations commission concluded Israel was perpetrating “genocide” and as Israeli forces begin major ground operations designed to occupy Gaza City.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has been under mounting pressure in recent weeks to take a tougher line against Benjamin Netanyahu’s government as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsened.
According to Kaja Kallas, the EU’s chief diplomat, the new package will see duties imposed on more than one-third of Israel’s trade with the EU, which was worth €42.6 billion last year.
On paper, the impact would be significant as the EU is Israel’s biggest trading partner. “Definitely this step will have a high cost for Israel,” Kallas told Euronews in a Tuesday interview.
But in reality the proposal has almost no chance of winning enough support from European governments to be implemented in the short term, or perhaps ever.
The EU’s record of action against what its leaders have condemned as Israel’s man-made famine this year has been one of strong words immediately undermined by weak follow-through.
It’s been 51 days since the Commission proposed what at the time was seen as the mildest possible penalty against Israel in protest at the mass starvation of Palestinians: suspending parts of the Horizon Europe research cooperation program. But not even that limited proposal made it beyond the debating stage.
While ever more governments have taken their own steps — sanctioning Israeli ministers and pledging to recognize a Palestinian state — the EU as a whole remains hopelessly split.
As von der Leyen herself admitted last week, “this is stuck without a majority. We must overcome this. We cannot afford to be paralyzed.” Europe’s “inability to agree,” she said, is “painful.”
The most tortured position of all is that of the bloc’s economic and political powerhouse: Germany.
Friedrich Merz, Germany’s new leader, who hails from the same conservative political family as von der Leyen, has grown increasingly outspoken in his criticism of Netanyahu’s administration since taking over as chancellor in Berlin in February. Last month he banned the export of all German weapons that could be used by Israel in Gaza.
But that immediately triggered a party backlash. Now, nobody in Brussels believes Merz is about to buckle and endorse von der Leyen’s plans to suspend the EU’s trade deal with Israel, even if some believe Germany and others will support more sanctions against violent Israeli settlers.
Without Germany’s support, the penalties on trade will not have the backing of the qualified majority of EU countries they need to be enacted. Formal sanctions against Israeli ministers will be even harder, as these measures require the unanimous support of all 27 EU governments to pass.
For Germany’s Merz, the question of how to handle Israel is miserably difficult. The Nazi legacy of the Holocaust casts a long shadow over German politics: On Monday night, an emotional Merz fought back tears in a speech at a synagogue in Munich denouncing a new wave of antisemitism.
“In politics and society, we have turned a blind eye for too long to the fact that a considerable number of the people who have come to Germany in recent decades were socialized in countries of origin where antisemitism is virtually state doctrine, where hatred of Israel is taught even to children,” Merz said.
Countries that fail to act to stop genocide can potentially be treated as complicit under the Genocide Convention, a fact that could theoretically push more European governments to support the EU’s sanction plans.
Yet for Merz, domestic considerations are likely to make it impossible for his government to endorse the assessment that genocide is under way, still less to take concrete action to curtail Israel-EU trade.
Katja Hoyer, a German-British academic and author of Beyond the Wall, said Merz’s relations with his own Christian Democrats will likely weigh on his thinking. “Surveys suggest that Merz has the majority of the German public on his side when it comes to a tougher stance on Israel, but his problem is the backlash he’d get from his own party,” she said.
“The CDU/CSU has long been the home for those who staunchly support Israel. For many, this is an integral part of the party’s soul. Already under pressure for various broken promises and for having disappointed conservative purists on a number of issues, I don’t know if Merz will feel that he can survive a policy change in this area unscathed.”
As for von der Leyen, the pain of Europe’s paralysis is likely to continue.
Karl Mathiesen contributed reporting.
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