EU seems to suddenly discover it has leverage on Israel

Irish Times

4 days ago

The
European Union
's foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas has spent a lot of time on the phone to
Israeli
foreign minister Gideon Sa'ar over the last few weeks.
For most of Israel's 22-month
war in Gaza
the EU has been seen as a bystander, paralysed by its inability to come to a joint position. Then word came through late last week that Israel had committed to letting a lot more humanitarian aid into the devastated
Palestinian
enclave, in a deal brokered by the EU.
This would mean a 'substantial' increase in the number of trucks bringing food and other vital aid allowed into Gaza. Food supplies to kitchens and bakeries would resume, power lines to a plant supplying clean drinking water would be repaired, and closed border crossings would be opened, as part of the deal.
The promise from Israel to stop choking off the flow of food, medicine and fuel into Gaza was unlikely to have been the result of a sudden change of heart by prime minister
Binyamin Netanyahu
's government.
The concessions were more likely an attempt to head off what had been growing momentum inside the EU to – finally – sanction Israel, or threaten to do so, if the dire conditions in Gaza did not improve.
It seems it took nearly two years of a war in which at least 58,000 Palestinians have been killed for the EU to discover it has some leverage over Israel.
The 11-week total blockade stopping aid entering Gaza, which left a cohort of its civilian population at risk of starvation, pushed the EU to up the pressure on Israel.
An effort started by Ireland and Spain, and more recently taken up by the Dutch, forced a review that found Israel had breached obligations to respect human rights made in an 'association agreement' with the EU.
The EU's foreign ministers this week debated a set of options the union could take in response. They included suspending the agreement, which governs EU-Israel relations, or shelving a free trade deal.
A paper put on the table by Kallas said the EU could ban imports from illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories, blacklist certain Israeli politicians or end visa-free travel for Israelis to the EU.
There has been a huge amount of behind-the-scenes lobbying from Israel recently. That suggests a real concern about the reputational damage of being sanctioned by the EU.
The deal on humanitarian aid was announced six days before EU foreign ministers were meeting in Brussels to debate options.
The commitment to let more aid into Gaza has shifted the focus on to whether Israel follows through on that pledge, limiting the appetite to press ahead with any penalty for now.
Most of the potential sanctions would require the unanimous support of all 27 capitals. That is a non-starter. Hungary, Germany, Italy, Austria and Czech Republic have blocked efforts to have the EU hold Israel accountable for its military campaign in Gaza.
Suspending the free trade deal only requires a sizeable majority of support. That would be a major blow to Netanyahu, as the EU is Israel's biggest trading partner.
However, for that to happen either Germany or Italy would need to switch positions, given their size, to secure enough support to suspend the trade deal.
Both governments opposed the EU pursuing any of the proposed sanctions against Israel at the meeting of foreign ministers this week. They pointed to the tentative aid commitments as a win, thanks to backchannel dialogue with Israel.
'If the threat of the stick is not plausible then you have no leverage,' says Sven Kühn von Burgsdorff, a former EU ambassador to the Palestinian territories.
The EU's response to Israel's war in Gaza had been defined by a 'complete absence of action', he says.
There was a big question mark over whether Israel would stick to commitments it had made in its agreement with the EU, he says. One note of caution should be the fact Kallas has not said how many extra aid trucks Israel has agreed to let enter Gaza a day.
Kühn von Burgsdorff served as head of the EU mission to the West Bank and Gaza from 2020 until mid-2023, where he says he 'saw the injustice before my eyes'.
A German who spent 31 years as a diplomat for the EU, Kühn von Burgsdorff says the union's timid response to Israel's bombardment of Gaza is a 'disaster' for its standing in the world.
It is a point the governments of Ireland and Spain have been making since the start of the conflict.
'It's about who we are, the Europeans, how we want our voice to be heard and influence the world,' Spain's foreign minister José Manuel Albares said this week. 'Europe is about human rights, about democracy, about international law and that's what we should uphold, whether it is in Ukraine or in Gaza,' he said.