To call the European Union a supporter of Israel and its fight against Hamas is already quite a push. But some member states are agitating for relations to sour even further, and in doing so are completely ignoring America’s warning “not to forget who the real enemy is.”
After the UK and Norway—alongside Australia, Canada, and New Zealand—sanctioned two Israeli ministers on Tuesday, saying they had “incited extremist violence,” Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard, of the centre-right ‘Moderate’ party, met EU top diplomat Kaja Kallas to say the bloc must also harden its stance.
“We have also been pushing for the sanctioning of extremist settlers,” she later told Politico,
But we now take the next step to also push for sanctioning individual extremist ministers, because we need to see things happening on the ground.
Malmer Stenergard went on to insist that “we are true friends of the Israeli people,” though this is a strange way of showing it.
EU-wide sanctions would require support from all the member states, which is highly unlikely to happen—because of Hungary, if no one else.
But pressure may be applied on Israel in other ways, including from big EU players like France, which last month backed a review of the bloc’s cooperation agreement with Israel. Spain’s Socialist prime minister Pedro Sánchez said the agreement should be suspended altogether.
Officials in these countries appear to be totally uninterested in accusations that they are undermining the Trump administration’s attempts to bring about peace in the Middle East. U.S. ambassador to the UK Warren Stephens warned after sanctions were imposed on Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben Gvir that “these measures impede constructive dialogue and do not advance our shared goals of supporting peace and security.”
Malmer Stenergard also appeared to ignore more than a thousand aid trucks entering Gaza over recent weeks, pointing on Thursday to what she described as “strong indications right now that Israel is not living up to its commitments under international humanitarian law.”
Michael Curzon is a news writer for europeanconservative.com based in England’s Midlands. He is also Editor of Bournbrook Magazine, which he founded in 2019, and previously wrote for London’s Express Online. His Twitter handle is @MichaelCurzon_.
