EU foreign ministers meeting in Brussels on Monday will discuss a possible ban on imports from illegal Israeli settlements, but the 27 ministers are not expected to take decisions about trade amid persistent divisions over how to respond to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his government. The machinery of European power is moving, slowly and with great caution, while the humanitarian crisis in Gaza continues and state-backed violence in the occupied West Bank has killed at least 235 children.
Brussels and the Border of Law
A part or total ban on imports from settlements is one of three options presented by the European Commission in a paper seen by the Guardian. The other two options are high tariffs that make trade economically unviable or an import licensing system. The leaked paper was first reported by Euronews. Written in cautious, bureaucratic language, the paper says the options “can have a substantive impact on the EU-Israel relationship, also in view of the upcoming election”, a line that makes the commission’s priorities plain enough: the Brussels apparatus is weighing legal obligation against political convenience, with Israel’s general election later this year in the frame.
Israelis are due to go to the polls by 27 October, the first electoral test for Netanyahu since the 7 October 2023 terror attacks by Hamas. Under the EU-Israel agreement, goods from the occupied Palestinian territories — the Golan Heights, Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem — are not entitled to the preferential trade terms that apply to Israel. The arrangement is already there on paper. The question is whether the institutions that love to talk about rules will enforce them when the trade flows are politically awkward.
At least 10 European member states, including Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain, say the EU has an obligation to end trade with occupied territories, following a ruling from the international court of justice in 2024 that called on Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territories “as rapidly as possible”. The ruling found multiple breaches of international law by Israel including activities that amounted to apartheid. It said that states had to “take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assists in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory”.
Law on Paper, Delay in Practice
The call to end trade with the settlements is backed by more than 100 legal scholars, who wrote to the European Commission’s most senior trade and foreign policy officials this month affirming the EU’s “international legal obligation”. Ignacio García Bercero, a former senior trade official at the commission, who signed the letter, said: “The only way to ensure compliance with the opinion of the ICJ is a ban on trade with the illegal settlements. Any other option will not be effective in view of Israeli policy to compensate settlement producers from tariffs paid on their exports to the EU.”
That is the blunt version. Tariffs and licensing systems can be dressed up as action, but the letter says they won’t work. The commission’s own menu of options includes measures that would leave trade intact in practice, just more expensive or more bureaucratic. The state’s favourite trick is to call that restraint.
A recent investigation by NGO Global Echo found that Israeli exporters benefit from illegal tax breaks for products cultivated in settlements, while Israeli tax authorities permit misleading labels. One in six shipments that the NGO investigated contained agricultural products that had originated in settlements in occupied Palestinian territory and the Syrian Golan Heights, at least 42% of which had been mislabelled as Israeli-grown. The trade system keeps moving, and the paperwork keeps smoothing the edges.
The EU is not expected to act anytime soon, amid an ongoing dispute about whether a ban on trade with illegal settlements can be done via a qualified majority vote or requires unanimity. After Monday’s meeting, EU foreign ministers will not gather in a decision-making format until October. The maximalist outcome from Monday, sources suggested, could be a call from a simple majority of member states to demand a legal proposal on ending illegal settlement trade. Even the strongest possible outcome on offer is a request for another proposal. The delay is built in.
The Electoral Circus and the Trade Machine
Alberto Alemanno, a law professor at the HEC Paris business school, said: “Each month of delay doesn’t just postpone compliance, it deepens the EU’s own legal liability for sustaining trade with an unlawful occupation.” One senior EU diplomat said it had been “a tough battle” to get the options paper, adding that there had not been “joyful cooperation” from the commission, which is responsible for drafting EU laws. Claudio Francavilla, an associate director at Human Rights Watch, said: “It is astonishing a ban is still presented as an ‘option’, when it’s the only measure that complies with international law.”
That is the shape of the European project on display here: a legal order that can identify an unlawful occupation, a trade regime that keeps profiting from it, and institutions that move only when forced, then only in the language of options, procedures and future meetings. Brussels calls it process. The people living under the consequences get something else entirely.