Wicklow, Ireland – “We have reached an impasse,” said Ireland’s Foreign Minister Helen McEntee at a gathering of European Union officials on Tuesday, summing up the bloc’s increasingly fractured position on trade sanctions on Israel.
Ireland, which currently holds the European Council’s presidency, and Spain pushed for EU-wide trade curbs on goods produced in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank at the September ۱-۲ meeting in Wicklow amid escalating settler violence against Palestinians.
France pressed for a stronger European response to Israeli rhetoric against Palestinians. “Condemnations from Israeli officials have been a good start, but they are not enough,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot told reporters, referring to Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s call for mass displacement in the Gaza Strip.
But several EU nations, including Germany and Hungary, opposed the move during the two-day informal gathering.
The Gymnich meeting, as the gathering is called, opened on Tuesday with renewed efforts by Dublin to revive discussions on sanctions against Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank – a proposal that has largely stalled in recent months because of divisions among member states.
The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, with bilateral trade standing at more than $۵۰bn.
Deadlock over Israel
Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, acknowledged that the absence of unanimity had once again prevented the bloc from moving forward on measures against Israel, despite growing pressure from several governments for a stronger European response to illegal settlement expansion and settler violence in the occupied Palestinian territory.
Ireland has argued that the EU’s credibility depends on applying international law consistently, regardless of the conflict under discussion. Dublin has also pointed to what it sees as a disparity between the bloc’s willingness to impose sanctions and other measures in response to Russia’s actions in Ukraine and its reluctance to take comparable action against Israel despite its ongoing genocide in Gaza and alarming rate of violence in the occupied Palestinian territory.
The disagreement is not simply over how member states view the Israel-Palestinian conflict, but over what practical steps the EU should take. Ireland and several other governments have pushed for stronger measures, including action against individuals involved in settler violence and restrictions on trade linked to illegal Israeli settlements, while other member states have been reluctant to support such proposals.
Divisions over Ukraine
Ukraine dominated much of the first day’s talks, with Kyiv continuing to call for greater European military support.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has entered its fifth year, with Moscow escalating drone and missile attacks against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure.
Kyiv again urged European governments to provide additional air defence systems after months of sustained Russian drone attacks.
Yet ministers again failed to bridge their differences.
Greece and Spain maintained their opposition to using common EU funds to finance further purchases of air defence systems, leaving Ukraine without the additional missiles and interceptors it had hoped for from the meeting.
On the sidelines of the talks, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha appealed directly to European media, warning that delays in military support would come at a growing cost as Russia has intensified its aerial campaign. It did not seem to move the needle much.
The Ukraine debate also exposed another longstanding fault line within the bloc.
While Poland, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands renewed calls to use frozen Russian sovereign assets to finance Ukraine’s military effort, Belgium, which holds the largest share of those assets, again resisted the proposal, citing unresolved legal and financial concerns.
Broader security challenges
Meanwhile, ministers also turned their attention to the wider Middle East.
The US-Israel war on Iran, now in its seventh month, has left European governments with limited diplomatic leverage despite the conflict directly affecting the continent, including concerns over energy security for the upcoming winter months.
The future of Lebanon, which continued to be attacked by Israel, was also discussed, with ministers considering a possible EU mission to train the Lebanese army as the mandate of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) ends this year.
Elsewhere, on August ۳۰, EU forces operating in the Mediterranean boarded a tanker suspected of being linked to Russia’s so-called shadow fleet, as part of broader European efforts to enforce sanctions against Moscow and disrupt attempts to evade them.
Internal strains persist
And if the external crises were not enough, the ministers also had some internal fires to deal with.
Just a day before the meeting, Italy renewed enhanced air and land checks on travellers arriving from Spain following a dispute linked to migration and border controls. Madrid responded by extending reciprocal measures.
The dispute followed an influx of migrants in Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta, after which Italy introduced additional checks on some travellers from Spain.
Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares urged other member states to support Madrid’s position on the border measures while criticising governments that, he said, had failed to support Spain during the Ceuta crisis.
At the end of the two-day meeting on Wednesday, ministers left having said more or less what they had said before.
“We are a dog that barks but doesn’t bite,” Luxembourg’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Xavier Bettel said at the meeting, expressing his frustration at the lack of support to sanction Israel.
After the meeting, the bloc is more or less where it started – plenty of shared concern, but very little shared action. The unanimity rule remains the EU’s Achilles heel – everyone has to agree, which means, in practice, almost nothing gets done.
