Four announcements were made on Monday, 13 July. Read together, they are the European Union's Palestine policy, complete.
In Brussels, the Foreign Affairs Council — the first under Ireland's new presidency of the Council — spent its Middle East session on a two-page Commission “options paper”: an import licensing system, prohibitive tariffs, or a full or partial ban on trade with Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and Golan. It decided none of them.
“The option that got the most support was banning trade with illegal settlements,” EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said afterwards . The file was handed down to the 27 ambassadors in COREPER, and ministers “will probably have an extraordinary meeting on this”. Probably. The next scheduled Foreign Affairs Council is on 12 October.
Settlement revolution
In the same hours, in the occupied West Bank, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced the first “roof agreement” with the Shomron Regional Council: approximately 12,000 new settlement housing units and more than 8 billion shekels for infrastructure and “settlement development”, scaling up the Karnei Shomron model signed in June .
“We are making history today,” Smotrich wrote — another instalment of the “ settlement revolution ” he declared on 6 July, three days after the security cabinet approved 13 new settlements designed, in its sponsors' own words, to make partition impossible. While Europe's ministers deliberated over whether deliberation should continue, the annexation was announced in units and shekels.
That same afternoon, back in Brussels, the Commission launched the Team Gaza Initiative — a nearly €900 million early-recovery package for Gaza assembled with sixty-five governments and organisations, the United Kingdom joining with £10 million. The aid is needed. Call it what it is, though: the EU itself, with the UN and the World Bank, assessed Gaza's recovery needs in April at $71.4 billion — $26.3 billion of it in the first eighteen months alone.
Monday's package is roughly 1% on every dollar of a bill Europe helped write, for destruction wrought with weapons Europe did not embargo, in a war Europe's leverage never seriously contested. Under the law of occupation, the occupying power bears responsibility for the territory it holds. When European taxpayers absorb that cost instead — for the third rebuilt Gaza in two decades — the donor is not softening the occupation but subsidising it. In a single day, Europe agreed to pay 1% of the consequences and postponed, again, the only measure on its table that touches the cause.
And in Tel Aviv, one of the Council's 27 chairs had, in effect, been left empty. Czech Foreign Minister Petr Macinka skipped the Brussels meeting to lead a two-day trade mission to Israel — more than 30 Czech companies , defence manufacturers among them — and to sign a joint declaration with Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar. He welcomed his “dear friend” on X while his guest's 26 colleagues debated the settlements. Sa'ar spent the evening declaring victory over them.
None of this was a surprise. EUobserver 's preview of the meeting ran under the headline ‘Crystal ball: EU will do nothing about Israel on Monday’. When the outcome of a meeting of 27 foreign ministers can be accurately headlined in advance, the problem is not disagreement.
Diplomats from several capitals accused the Commission of “delay tactics” — the two-page paper was delivered so late that no decision was mathematically possible before the autumn.
Spain's José Manuel Albares said it in the open: “I am concerned that we are engaging in a delaying tactic, debating and debating without taking any action .” This is not gridlock. It is choreography.
Two years of process
Consider the sequence. On 19 July 2024 — two years ago this Sunday — the International Court of Justice found Israel's occupation of Palestinian territory unlawful in its entirety and put every state on notice of two duties: not to recognise the situation as lawful, and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining it. The UN General Assembly set a 12-month deadline for compliance; it expired in September 2025.
The EU's response has been a genre of its own. A review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement that found “indications” Israel was in breach of its human rights clause, then was shelved; a ten-option paper in July 2025 that produced no action; a proposal to suspend the trade pillar of the Association Agreement that “never materialised” ; sanctions on a handful of violent settlers and their organisations that took until May 2026 — four entities and three individuals, after two years of documented pogroms.
Each round follows the same grammar: an atrocity, a review, a paper, a debate, a deferral. The output is never a measure. It is always another document. Monday added a new subgenre: the two-page options paper, referred to a committee, pending a meeting that will “probably” take place.
The fight inside the Council sounds technical. It is everything. If restricting settlement trade is a trade measure under Article 207 of the EU treaties, it passes by qualified majority — 15 states representing 65% of the EU's population — with the European Parliament involved. If it is a “sanction” under the Common Foreign and Security Policy, it requires unanimity, and any single capital can kill it.
On Monday, Kallas stopped hiding the lawyers' answer behind diplomatic paraphrase and put it on the record : “There is a legal opinion we can do this … with QMV, the Council legal services said that, and, of course, if there is will, we can move forward.”
To those manufacturing doubt, she offered a Brussels proverb: “You can always find different lawyers who come up with different ideas. So, two lawyers, three opinions.”
The Commission — backed by Germany — insists on treating the measure as a sanction anyway, and Euractiv reported the resulting “turf war” between Ursula von der Leyen's Commission and Kallas's diplomatic service bursting into the open.
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul made it clear that import restrictions “should only be adopted unanimously”, and Berlin prefers “talks with the Israeli government” to measures, even as he reiterated that settlement policy “is not in line with international law”.
German media also stated it plainly: ‘Germany blocks measures against settlement policy’. Yet Berlin's cover is eroding at home. On the morning of the FAC, Der Spiegel — no radical outlet — published a commentary arguing an import ban “must no longer be taboo”, and that Chancellor Friedrich Merz's description of West Bank violence as “unprecedented” is credible only if Germany stops blocking one.
Belgium's Maxime Prévot called the Commission's options “more a bone to gnaw on than a genuine desire to move forward”. And one EU diplomat put the institutional hypocrisy on the record: “In all other files, the Commission always tries to extend her competence and here suddenly it discovers unanimity? One could laugh if it weren’t so serious.”
The diplomat has the law on his side. The common commercial policy is an exclusive EU competence exercised by the majority as a matter of routine — to impose tariffs, to withdraw trade preferences from Cambodia and Myanmar over human rights violations, and, most recently, to legislate the phase-out of Russian fossil fuels as a trade measure precisely to avoid a veto.
Nor would a settlement measure even be a “sanction on Israel” in any legal sense. The EU's own courts have held since 2010 that settlement goods are not Israeli goods entitled to preferential treatment, and since 2019 that they cannot be labelled “Made in Israel”. Settlements are not Israel — that is the EU's established legal position, and on Monday Kallas herself framed the measure as fixing member states' existing customs obligations, which are being “inconsistently implemented”, rather than as a move “against Israel”.
A regulation excluding settlement produce from the single market is trade law catching up with the EU's own non-recognition doctrine , as a growing body of legal opinion and policy analysis has argued.
One precision matters, because Israel's defenders will exploit sloppiness here. France's Jean-Noël Barrot has compared the proposal to the EU's 2014 Crimea measures . The comparison is powerful, but for substance and speed rather than procedure. The Crimea import ban was adopted as a sanction, unanimously, within three months of the annexation. No options paper, no orientation debate, no two-year anniversary of an unimplemented court opinion.
The Crimea precedent proves the EU can ban every import from an occupied territory almost overnight when it wants to. Article 207 proves it does not need a consensus to do so here. The two arguments together close every exit, which is presumably why the Commission has chosen to litigate the voting rule rather than the principle.
The map of the 27
The positions per capital, assembled from doorsteps, national media and public records, look like this. France and Sweden have spearheaded the push, backed by Belgium, Ireland — whose own settlement import ban passed the Dáil on 7 July and which now holds the Council presidency — the Netherlands (a national settlement trade ban since May), and Spain, with Denmark, Finland, Portugal, Malta and Luxembourg alongside, and as many as 20 member states having asked the Commission to detail the options in the first place.
Cautious or conditional: Germany, Italy — Antonio Tajani, the pivotal swing vote , says Rome is “ready to evaluate” measures on settlement products — Austria, Greece and Cyprus (anchored to Israel by their Eastern Mediterranean security triangle), Croatia, Romania, Poland (sympathetic under Radosław Sikorski, wary of the legal-base fight) and the Baltics. Openly blocking: Czechia, Slovakia, and — since Janez Janša returned to power in June and reversed every measure of the previous government, down to removing the Palestinian flag from the government building — Slovenia.
Czech public television reports Prague, Sofia and Ljubljana against the import restriction outright .
The Czech position deserves quotation in full because it is the blocking strategy stated as doctrine. Standing beside Sa'ar in Prague in May, Macinka declared that Czechia “will not permit any further trade sanctions against Israel” even if it were “the only EU state blocking them”. He added that Prague will “look for blocking minorities in agendas decided by qualified majority, so that no further aggressive steps against the State of Israel come from the EU”.
Read that twice: a member state announcing, in advance, that it will organise minorities to defeat majority decisions of its own Union — in defence of a third state's occupation. On Monday he did not even attend the Council at which that strategy was the question; he was in Tel Aviv executing it. If a government treated single-market rules this way, Brussels would call it sabotage.
And then there is Hungary — for years the all-purpose alibi. In May, Péter Magyar's new government dropped Viktor Orbán's veto and the settler sanctions passed within days, prompting predictions that the road to EU action was finally open .
Two months later, the outcome is unchanged: no trade measure, no timetable, a new set of procedural objections — the Commission's legal scruples, Berlin's unanimity doctrine, Prague's blocking minorities. When the famous veto falls and nothing moves, the veto was never the cause. The obstruction is distributed, and it rotates.
What Israel heard
Within hours of the meeting ending, Sa'ar declared victory : “The latest attempt by Kaja Kallas to impose sanctions on Israel failed once again... There was no consensus. There was no qualified majority. In fact, there was no majority at all.” The referral to COREPER, he added, was an attempt “to circumvent the rules”.
Set aside the factual duel — Kallas says “most” member states back a full ban; Sa'ar says there was no majority at all; both claims are unfalsifiable precisely because nothing was tabled and nothing was voted on, which is one more argument for tabling and voting.
Notice instead what is happening structurally: Israel's foreign minister now litigates the European Union's internal voting procedures in public, championing unanimity — Berlin's position — as “the rules”, and describing the treaties' own qualified-majority provisions as a trick. When a third state under legal scrutiny adopts your constitutional argument as its shield, the argument has stopped being neutral.
The calendar is Israel's second shield. Netanyahu faces elections expected on 27 October ; the next scheduled FAC is 12 October; and the argument that measures now “would be counterproductive” before the vote — aired in POLITICO's Brussels Playbook and in the room — is already circulating. The sequence writes itself: too early before the Israeli election, too destabilising during coalition-building after it, too provocative for a new government thereafter.
Every deferral is read in Jerusalem, correctly, as permission. Smotrich's 12,000 units were announced before the ministers had finished their working lunch.
The law does not come in options
Here is the deepest problem with Monday, and it is one Palestinians have been making for two years, joined by a widening circle of European jurists : the options paper misstates the question. The ICJ did not advise the EU that it may, if political conditions allow, consider whether to restrict settlement trade. It found that third states are under an obligation not to render aid or assistance in maintaining an unlawful situation — the same rule, codified in Article 41 of the Articles on State Responsibility, that the EU invokes verbatim when it demands the world isolate Russia's annexations.
And for the Union the duty is doubly binding, because it wrote it into its own constitution: Article 3(5) of the Treaty commits the EU to “the strict observance and the development of international law” in all external action. Palestinian human rights lawyers have stated the consequence for years with a precision Brussels has never rebutted.
“While the EU has been quite outspoken in condemning settlements and their expansion,” Al-Haq's general director Shawan Jabarin observed , “they continue to import produce from these same settlements and in doing so, help to sustain their very existence.” Buying the produce of the settlement economy is assistance. Compliance with international law is not a menu with three options and an October deadline.
Now measure what was actually on the table. Settler exports to the EU are worth an estimated €150–250 million a year — the Commission does not know the real figure, because member states do not report the data correctly, which is itself the failure of the “differentiation” policy the EU cites as proof of compliance. A full ban would touch some 45 settler firms , mostly food and wine, against €43.3 billion in overall EU-Israel trade in 2025, billions in Horizon research grants, and an Association Agreement untouched since a review found “indications” of human rights breaches.
The strongest option ministers declined to adopt on Monday is not the ceiling of the EU's leverage; it is the floor of its legal obligations — a rounding error, deferred. And while it is deferred, the UN's own count from last week's report: an average of six settler attacks a day , 187 Palestinian children injured this year, 16 killed by soldiers and settlers in 2026 — the latest, a 16-year-old boy, on 5 July, while the options paper was being circulated. That is the threshold Palestinians are told to applaud: two years after the World Court, Europe's most debated measure would inconvenience 45 wineries.
What seriousness would look like
None of this is unfixable, which is what makes Monday damning rather than tragic. Seriousness has a checklist. The Commission tables an Article 207 regulation — a ban on the import and marketing of settlement goods and services — and publishes the Council legal service's opinion instead of leaving it to be paraphrased at press conferences. The “probable” extraordinary ministers' meeting gets a date before 12 October , not after the Israeli elections.
The 20 governments that demanded options convert their doorsteps into a written request, as Prévot demands: “real proposals that member states can vote on, and soon.” Germany, whose population weight makes it the arithmetic kingmaker of any qualified majority, decides whether its Staatsräson really extends to financing, through trade, an enterprise its own foreign minister calls contrary to international law — and if Berlin cannot vote yes, it abstains: under majority voting, abstention does not block.
Member states keep legislating nationally, as Ireland and the Netherlands have, proving feasibility and raising the cost of Brussels' delay. And those who want Europe to matter go further, as Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain propose, to the Association Agreement's trade preferences themselves — the first measure Israel's government would actually feel.
Kallas closed Monday's press conference with her standing maxim: when divided, “Europe is weak and can be pushed around”. But on settlements, Europe is not divided on the law — by its own chief diplomat's on-camera account, all 27 governments subscribe to the same characterisation of illegality. It is divided over whether the law binds when Israel is its subject.
That is not a division of opinion; it is a division of will. It is being noticed — in Moscow, across the Global South, and above all in the hills of the West Bank, where the distance between a European “option” and a Palestinian eviction is measured in days. On 13 July, Europe announced a fund, a deferral and an absence, and Israel announced 12,000 homes. One of those two actors will have changed the map by 12 October. It will not be Europe.
Lema Nazeeh is a policy analyst and international lawyer based in Brussels. A former diplomat at the Palestinian Mission to the European Union, where she was responsible for EU–Palestine relations, she served on the State of Palestine's legal teams in the ICJ advisory proceedings on Israel's occupation and on the ICC's Palestine file. She holds an LLM in International Criminal Law from Italy.
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