EU foreign ministers fail to break deadlock over Israel and Ukraine

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 1-2 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 $50bn.

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.