The European Union had a tool in its arsenal to force Israel’s hand in halting its brutal war on Gaza, waged since October 7, 2023, but it chose to prioritise business over human rights, compromising in the process one of its own key tenets.
At a ministerial gathering hailed as “historic” by EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas, the 27-member bloc brought Israeli and Palestinian representatives to the same table for the first time in years — along with Syria, returning after more than a decade.
But behind the optics of dialogue and diplomacy, critics say the EU once again ducked its responsibility to uphold the rules-based international order and granted Israel de facto impunity amid mounting accusations of genocide in Gaza.
Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, sharply criticised the EU’s continued normalisation of relations with Israel.
“‘Historic’ would be a meeting leading to the end of the genocide,” she said on X, “the dismantling of Israel’s forever-occupation and apartheid, and the beginning of justice and accountability.”
While the gathering, officially called the 5th EU-Southern Neighbourhood Ministerial Meeting, was intended to reinvigorate the 30-year-old Barcelona Process and introduce a New Pact for the Mediterranean, observers argue it also exposed the moral bankruptcy of Europe’s approach to the Middle East.
Despite well-documented violations of humanitarian law in Gaza and a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that found a plausible case of genocide, the EU Foreign Affairs Council on Monday failed to take any action under Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, which obliges the bloc to suspend agreements with states that violate human rights.
That failure, said Josep Borrell Fontelles, former EU foreign policy chief, “is in itself a decision: Europe decides not to punish Israel’s continued war crimes and allows the Gaza genocide to proceed unabated”.
Under Article 2 of the 2000 EU-Israel Association Agreement, continued co-operation is conditional on respect for human rights.
Yet even after EU officials quietly admitted that their own legal review found Israel in violation of international humanitarian law, no consensus emerged among member states to act on the findings.
European Commissioner for the Mediterranean, Dubravka Suica, speaking ahead of the meeting, said she did not expect major EU member states to change their stance regarding the review of Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
Albanese, the UN special rapporteur, didn’t mince words in her rebuke, saying “Debating whether Israel is violating human rights under Article 2 is not only superfluous — it is grotesque.”
“The matter has already been settled by the ICJ and multiple UN bodies. Since decades.”
The EU’s decision to prioritise “dialogue” over accountability is even more controversial in light of rising trade with Israel.
Between 2023 and 2024, EU exports to Israel increased by $1.3 billion, the UN special rapporteur said, despite the scale of destruction in Gaza, where over 17,000 children have reportedly been killed and starvation is being used as a weapon of war.
“Maintaining trade with an economy inextricably tied to occupation, apartheid, and genocide is complicity,” Albanese said.
Legal experts and genocide scholars have long pointed out the risks of undermining the international legal order by tolerating flagrant violations.
The ICJ’s preliminary ruling in January and subsequent orders in May and July have compelled Israel to halt operations that could plausibly constitute acts of genocide, but Tel Aviv has continued to act with impunity since then.
Yet, EU member states, most notably Germany, France and Italy, have continued to provide political cover and in some cases military exports to Tel Aviv.
“Today, EU leaders face a choice: to deepen this appalling stain, or to finally uphold the values the Union claims to represent,” Albanese said. “History is in the making.”
