YEAR III  ·  No. 647  ·  SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2026

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SERIESISRAEL-PALESTINE
DOCUMENTARY SERIES
"THE STATE OF CRIME"

History of Zionism

By Gabriel Schwarb·September 26, 2026·14 min read

EP09 – Interference and Alliances Beyond the United States

by

Europe has spoken the language of law since 1980. It speaks it in Brussels, in communiqués, in council conclusions drafted with the legal care of someone who has no intention of applying them. The instruments that actually move something, weapons, satellites, drones, commercial credit, remain decided capital by capital, company by company, never passing through a collective vote. This partition is no bureaucratic accident. It is written into the treaties from before Washington became the ally it is known as today, and it explains, better than any speech on European unity, why the continent can condemn without ever braking.

Bonn and Paris before Washington

The first Western alliance with the State of Israel did not fly an American flag. On 10 September 1952, in Luxembourg, the Federal Republic of Germany signed a reparations agreement with Israel worth 3 billion marks, plus a further 450 million for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims. Its entry into force, on 27 March 1953, followed ratification by the Bundestag, amid demonstrations and an attempted assassination of Adenauer. The money, paid in goods and services rather than cash, financed a considerable share of Israel’s industrial infrastructure over the following decade.

France followed a different but equally early path. Under the Fourth Republic and then under De Gaulle, Paris was during the 1950s Israel’s principal arms supplier, nuclear cooperation at Dimona included. That link broke on 3 June 1967, when De Gaulle decreed an arms embargo on all parties to the region on the eve of the Six-Day War, a measure that in practice struck mainly at Israel. The embargo tightened after the Israeli attack on Beirut airport in December 1968 and culminated, in December 1969, in the clandestine flight of the Cherbourg boats, five patrol vessels built for the Israeli navy that France was refusing to hand over. The United States was only just beginning, in those same years, to become the principal supplier it would become after 1973. Within less than two decades, Paris had gone from principal patron to reluctant bystander, a reversal no treaty ever announced in advance.

Two European capitals, then, not an Atlantic alliance already in place. Bonn was buying its readmission into the community of nations with annual cheques, Paris was selling Mirage fighters and reactors until a geopolitical shift forbade it from one day to the next. Neither decision passed through a common institution, because in 1952 and in 1967 that common institution, quite simply, did not yet exist. The European Economic Community was then less than a decade old and held no mandate over foreign policy. What would come later, a collective voice capable of stating principles, would take nearly three more decades to appear, and when it did appear, it carried no power over arms or money to match what Bonn and Paris had already shown they could wield alone. The absence was no oversight; it reflected exactly how little sovereignty over foreign policy either capital was prepared to surrender to a common institution at the time.

On 10 September 1952, the Federal Republic of Germany undertook to pay Israel 3 billion marks, plus 450 million to the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany. (Reparations Agreement, treaty registered with the United Nations, UNTS vol. 162)

Venice 1980, the language of law

On 13 June 1980, at the European Council meeting in Venice, the Nine set out for the first time, collectively, the vocabulary Europe still repeats today. The declaration affirmed that the Palestinian people should fully exercise their right to self-determination, that the Palestine Liberation Organisation would have to be associated with negotiations, and that Israeli settlements constituted a serious obstacle to peace and were illegal under international law. The Nine added that they would not accept any unilateral initiative aimed at changing the status of Jerusalem.

Israel’s response was immediate and unqualified. Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared the declaration to the surrender of the Sudetenland at Munich in 1938, accused the Europeans of offering guarantees to those seeking, in his words, to destroy the Jewish state, and blocked for weeks the entry of a European fact-finding mission into the territory. Within the cabinet itself, Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon led that resistance.

That vocabulary did not remain confined to Venice. The European Council returned to it in Berlin, in March 1999, reaffirming the Palestinian right to a state of its own, and again in December 2012, when those same words, illegal settlements, obstacle to peace, moved from political declaration into the text of ministerial conclusions meant to be applied. Forty-six years after Venice, that language remains, almost word for word, what the European Union Council’s communiqués still use. What changed was not the vocabulary, but the distance between saying it and enforcing it.

The line of differentiation

The Euro-Mediterranean association agreement between the European Union and Israel, in force since June 2000, establishes in its Article 2 that respect for human rights and democratic principles constitutes an essential element of the agreement. Its Article 79 provides that, should this clause be breached, either party may adopt appropriate measures, with priority given to those that least disturb the functioning of the agreement.

On 10 December 2012, at its 3209th meeting, the Foreign Affairs Council gave that clause a precise territorial translation. Its conclusions demanded that all agreements between Israel and the European Union unambiguously indicate their inapplicability to the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, namely the Golan Heights, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Seven years later, on 12 November 2019, the Court of Justice of the European Union, in Case C-363/18, gave that differentiation jurisprudential force. The Court ruled, in the exact terms of its official communiqué, that any foodstuff originating in a territory occupied by the State of Israel must bear the indication of its territory of origin and, when it also comes from an Israeli settlement inside that territory, the indication of that provenance too.

This architecture has a particularity rarely explained to a non-specialist reader. Differentiating trade territorially and banning it outright are two distinct legal acts, with distinct legal bases and, above all, distinct decision-making procedures. The first can be enacted by officials updating customs codes, the second cannot, however loudly it is demanded. Differentiation has existed since 2012, is applied through labelling and requires no further Council vote, while the ban remains, in 2026, unrealised, because it requires precisely the kind of majority this episode documents and that rarely comes together.

The practical difference is enormous and is almost never explained this way. A European consumer who reads on a label the exact origin of a date or a wine is not looking at a sanction or a coercive measure. He is looking at the one point in this architecture that applies without twenty-seven governments needing to agree.

Who decides what

Herein lies the mechanism that no individual sanction can conceal. Suspension of the trade preferences under the association agreement, which the European Commission formally proposed on 17 September 2025, is decided by qualified majority in the Council, that is to say with the support of at least fifteen states representing sixty-five per cent of the Union’s population. Individual sanctions against settlers or leaders, by contrast, are decided under the common foreign and security policy regime, which requires unanimity. Arms exports, for their part, do not depend on Brussels at all, even though Common Position 2008/944/CFSP sets common criteria, among them respect for human rights and international humanitarian law in the country of final destination. Granting or refusing each licence remains, in practice, the exclusive competence of each member state. Twenty-seven separate calculations, twenty-seven separate risk appetites, none of them bound by what the other twenty-six decide.

The arithmetic of qualified majority explains what no communiqué openly admits. Germany accounts for around nineteen per cent of the European Union’s population, Italy for close to thirteen per cent, according to Eurostat. Together, acting as a blocking bloc, they would total thirty-two per cent, below the thirty-five per cent threshold a blocking minority requires.

A blocking minority in the Council must comprise at least four member states, failing which the qualified majority is deemed attained, even if the population threshold is not met. (Article 16(4) of the Treaty on European Union)

Germany and Italy alone, even aligned, cannot mathematically block a trade suspension, lacking both the population and the number of partners required. What has blocked it so far, episode after episode, is the absence of a favourable majority, not the strength of a hostile minority. The difference is more than semantic, because it shifts political responsibility away from two or three resistant capitals and onto the scattered indifference of a larger number of governments that would rather not have to take a position at all.

The test of 2024 to 2026

The recent record allows the mechanism to be observed in motion, with precise dates. The Council sanctioned, on 19 April 2024, four settlers and two entities, Lehava and Hilltop Youth, under the European sanctions regime for serious human rights violations. Three months later, on 15 July, it added five people and three further entities, this time also for blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza.

A more modest proposal, excluding Israel from the EIC Accelerator programme within Horizon Europe, failed at Council on 30 July 2025. Eight states backed it, among them the Netherlands, Ireland, France and Spain. Hungary, Bulgaria and Czechia opposed it openly, while Germany and Italy, decisive because of their demographic weight, said they needed more time, which in practice sealed the failure without either having to vote against it.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz suspended, on 8 August 2025, exports of military equipment usable in the Israeli offensive on Gaza City. A month later, on 17 September, the Commission proposed its most ambitious package to date, suspension of trade preferences, sanctions against two Israeli ministers and against violent settlers, and an end to non-humanitarian bilateral support. Those German restrictions did not last long, the Merz government announced on 17 November 2025 that it would lift them, with effect from 24 November, citing the ceasefire in force in Gaza since 10 October.

Spain, Ireland and Slovenia formally asked, on 21 April 2026, the Foreign Affairs Council to suspend the association agreement. German minister Johann Wadephul called it inopportune, his Italian counterpart Antonio Tajani announced the matter was shelved, and Kallas herself later confirmed there was insufficient support either for a total or a partial suspension. Three weeks later, after Viktor Orbán’s replacement by Péter Magyar in Budapest and the end of the Hungarian veto that had paralysed the file for months, the Council reached, on 11 May, a political agreement to sanction settlers and Hamas leaders, though the trade suspension still failed to muster the necessary majority. A fresh round of sanctions, on 28 May, added Nachala and its leader Daniella Weiss, Regavim, Hashomer Yosh and the Amana cooperative, bringing the total under that regime to one hundred and thirty-six people and forty-one entities. The four organisations named, dedicated to the promotion or logistical support of settlements in the West Bank, were placed under the same asset-freeze and travel-ban regime already weighing on settlers sanctioned in 2024.

In July 2026 the discussion turned towards a more limited hypothesis, banning or taxing trade specifically with the settlements, not with Israel as a whole. On 14 July, Kallas admitted to ministers that the very legal basis remained disputed, qualified majority as trade policy or unanimity as sanction, with lawyers reaching different conclusions depending on who commissioned the opinion. Ireland and Spain kept pressing, Germany, Italy, Hungary and Czechia held their reservations. Israeli minister Gideon Sa’ar replied that a majority had never existed, qualified or otherwise. No decision was taken that day. The file returned, essentially unchanged, to the drawer it had occupied for the better part of two years.

Between 7 and 10 September 2026, the International Court of Justice held hearings at The Hague on the preliminary objections raised by Germany in the case Nicaragua brought over its support for Israel. A preliminary objection is, in the Court’s vocabulary, an argument seeking to close the proceedings before the merits are examined, contending that the Court lacks jurisdiction or that the application is inadmissible for some reason unrelated to the facts alleged. It was therefore a strictly procedural debate, with no ruling whatsoever on the underlying accusations. Germany’s agent, Julia Monar, and Nicaragua’s agent, Carlos Argüello Gómez, set out their positions over two successive rounds, Germany on Monday and Wednesday, Nicaragua on Tuesday and Thursday. The Court decided nothing that week. It only listened, and only on the question of whether it has the right to listen to the rest.

Technology does not vote

While the Council deliberates over population percentages, the equipment keeps moving through channels no European vote controls. According to the annual report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute published in March 2026, the United States supplied sixty-eight per cent of Israel’s arms imports between 2021 and 2025, Germany thirty-one per cent, up twelve per cent on the previous five-year period. Germany was, for much of that period, Israel’s second-largest supplier worldwide, with naval equipment such as the Saar 6 frigates deployed off Gaza, which explains the symbolic weight of its August 2025 suspension.

Surveillance cooperation follows a similar pattern, more discreet and more durable. Frontex, the European border agency, renewed in December 2024, for four years, its contract to operate Heron maritime drones, manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries in partnership with the European firm Airbus, with more than six hundred and fifty thousand flight hours accumulated worldwide by that same aircraft model. The data these craft gather over the Mediterranean go straight to Frontex’s command centre in Warsaw and to each host country’s control centres. No national parliament votes on this cooperation each year, because it is neither a sanction nor a trade suspension, it is a services contract between a Community agency and a manufacturer, renewed with the same administrative routine as any other supplier of aerial equipment.

The International Court of Justice, in its advisory opinion of 19 July 2024, had found by twelve votes to three that all states have an obligation not to recognise as lawful Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory and not to render aid or assistance in maintaining it. It is a general obligation of international law, addressed equally to two hundred states. Compliance with it, unlike compliance with a Council regulation, carries no enforcement mechanism of its own. What this episode shows is that between that general obligation and its translation into a drone contract or a specific export licence, no European mechanism exists capable of enforcing coherence. The law is voted in Brussels. The drones fly regardless…

G.S.

Sources

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Gabriel Schwarb

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gabriel Schwarb

Gabriel Schwarb is the founding director and editor in chief of AcidReport, a Swiss-Colombian writer with more than three decades of professional practice in art direction, web development and investigative journalism. The outlet operates as a non-profit association, governed by Article 60 of the Swiss Civil Code, with no political affiliation, no advertising and no external funding. It publishes in Spanish, French and English, and covers Latin America and Europe as a mirror, each continent explained through the other.

He founded it convinced that Iván Duque's 2018 victory over Gustavo Petro had not been clean, a suspicion reinforced by the Ñeñe Hernández scandal, and that the real Colombia found no place in its own media. Born as an information bridge between Colombia and Europe, the project later widened to all of Latin America, and is read today across the entire world. His method combines strict source verification, archival work and public correction of errors. He does not publish to please. He publishes to answer.

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