The European Union, in its latest display of diplomatic indecision and moral posturing, is now entertaining the notion of slapping sanctions on Israel — the very country still reeling from the horrors of October 7th 2023, when Hamas terrorists unleashed the worst mass slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
Instead of rallying behind the victim of jihadist barbarism, Brussels appears more interested in parsing legal niceties and appeasing a vocal activist class obsessed with “proportionality.”
At the heart of this dangerous drift lies the EU-Israel Association Agreement, a key trade pact that grants Israel preferential access to the world’s largest single market. Under pressure from several member states, notably the Netherlands, the European Commission has initiated a formal review of Israel’s compliance with Article 2 of that agreement, which requires respect for human rights. The implication — unsubtle and unmistakable — is that Israel, by defending itself against Hamas in Gaza, has forfeited its moral legitimacy and, by extension, its European privileges.
This represents a deeply troubling inversion of reality. Israel, a liberal democracy surrounded by Islamist regimes and terrorist enclaves, is being treated not as a besieged nation-state but as a global pariah. The initiator of this review, Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp, has apparently decided that the only human rights worth examining are those of Palestinians — not the rights of Israeli civilians to live without fear of rockets, rapes, kidnappings, and pogroms.
To grasp the absurdity of Brussels’ position, one need only recall the events of October 7th. Hamas’s atrocities were not accidental by-products of war, but deliberate acts of savagery: civilians burned alive, children beheaded, women gang-raped and paraded as trophies. In any other context — say, if this were a Western capital under assault — there would be no hesitation in recognising the need for a decisive, sustained military response.
Yet when Israel does precisely that — fights to dismantle the Hamas death cult embedded in Gaza’s civilian infrastructure — it is met with lectures from European politicians who speak in the sterile language of “disproportionality” and “restraint.” What, exactly, would proportionality look like when faced with an enemy that hides behind women and schools, fires rockets from hospitals, and openly seeks genocide?
The answer from Brussels seems to be that Israel should fight with one hand tied behind its back, while Hamas is allowed to operate with impunity. This, in effect, is the logic of the proposed sanctions: punish the democratic state for not conducting war in the way imagined by lawyers in Strasbourg.
One cannot help but notice the geopolitical myopia here. While Israel is threatened with economic punishment for defending itself, the EU continues to do business with regimes like Iran — the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror and the patron of Hamas. European diplomats who agonise over Israel’s alleged “violations” are curiously silent on the routine executions of protesters in Tehran, or the Chinese gulags in Xinjiang. Moral clarity, it seems, is reserved only for Israel.
Of course, no nation is above criticism — least of all one engaged in the fog of war. But there is a world of difference between legitimate scrutiny and selective outrage. The EU’s approach to Israel smacks less of concern for human rights than of an institutional allergy to Israeli self-defence. Or is it institutional anti-Semitism? This writer would not be the first to ask that question.
Worse, it risks emboldening Hamas and other Iranian proxies by signalling that European support for Israel is conditional, brittle, and easily withdrawn under pressure.
Let us not forget what the suspension of the Association Agreement would truly signify. It would not be a slap on the wrist over some marginal policy disagreement. It would be the formal downgrading of ties with the only pluralist, high-tech democracy in the Middle East — a country that shares Europe’s values far more closely than most of its neighbours – and even one or two EU member states. It would also damage Europe’s own standing by reinforcing the notion that the EU cannot distinguish between aggressor and victim.
In the long term, this self-righteous ambiguity will not serve Europe well. A continent already struggling with the rise of jihadist networks within its own borders should think twice before alienating the only country in the region that understands — at the most visceral level — what those threats entail.
Rather than isolating Israel, the EU should be affirming its solidarity, both moral and strategic. Anything less is not just a betrayal of an ally, but of the West’s collective conscience.
