For months, the EU has been calling on Spain and Ireland to review the trade agreement with Israel due to that country’s violations of international law in Gaza. Compliance with international legal standards is one of the requirements contained in this international agreement. The Twenty-Seven coldly received this proposal, formulated by Pedro Sánchez and his Irish counterpart at the time, Leo Varadkar, in a letter addressed in February to the President of the European Commission. Four months later, when Benjamin Netanyahu ignored the international justice resolution by attacking Rafah, they moved slightly by giving the green light to Josep Borrell to summon the Israeli foreign minister, but since then the case has been paralyzed and, under pressure from Sánchez and Ireland’s new Prime Minister, Simon Harris, in recent days, Borrell admitted that he will have to force a debate on the issue at the next meeting with foreign ministers.
Borrell acknowledged that the request from Spain and Ireland did not receive a response and cooled the possibility of a future meeting of the Association Council between the EU and Israel, because this requires a prior agreement between the parties on the agenda of the meeting. And it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen in the coming weeks.
The High Representative’s solution is therefore for the next Foreign Affairs Council, bringing together ministers, to “take its responsibilities and try to provide a response to this request”. What Borrell intends in what will be his last meeting with EU foreign affairs officials before leaving the post in which Estonian Kaja Kallas will replace him is that the situation be “assessed, debated and decided » on what the 27 think about it. The meeting is scheduled for November 18.
“I believe that the European Commission, the government of all Europeans, must respond once and for all to the formal request made nine months ago by two European countries, Spain and Ireland, and suspend the agreement “association with the government of Israel if it is confirmed, as everything suggests, that human rights are being violated,” Sánchez said this Monday.
What the head of European diplomacy has clearly indicated is that the European Commission has nothing to say for the moment, because it is not yet a question of the trade question but rather of those responsible for Foreign Affairs who determine whether there has been a violation of human rights. . this leads them to suspend relations with Israel. The EU’s precedent is in Syria, a country whose trade deal was partially suspended due to Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown in 2011.
In this case, the EU position is completely divided. While Spain, Ireland, Belgium and now also France – which called for the arms embargo – take tougher positions against Netanyahu’s massacre in Gaza, other countries are modernizing Tel- Aviv. Every step the EU has taken to combat the carnage in the Middle East has required enormous diplomatic efforts and has always come late. It took the EU five months to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and the 27 took more than 48 hours to agree on a statement condemning Israeli attacks on Gaza’s peacekeeping mission. the UN in Lebanon in which 16 member states participate.
In this statement, the EU highlights for the first time Israel’s violation of international law. “These attacks against UN peacekeepers constitute a serious violation of international law and are completely unacceptable. These attacks must stop immediately,” indicates the text published Sunday evening. “I would have liked to react more quickly to something that was obvious,” admitted Borrell, the head of European diplomacy, about the difficulty of reaching a common position.
After the meeting with EU foreign ministers, Borrell took the opportunity to defend the UN’s work in the Middle East and warned that there was no intention to withdraw troops from the Lebanon. “No member state was in favor of the withdrawal of UNIFIL,” declared the high representative, who recalled that the hypothetical decision of a withdrawal belongs to the UN Security Council and not to its secretary general, António Guterres, whom he defended again.
