Just a few days before the EU-Israel Association Council, seven NGOs held a press conference on Wednesday 19 February to demand the suspension of the Association Agreement on the grounds of “serious violations of international law” by the Israeli authorities.
This Agreement, which has been in force since 2000, can only be suspended with the unanimous agreement of the 27 Member States.
The representatives of the organisations strongly criticised “Israeli impunity” for the actions carried out in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. They called on the EU to respect its “moral commitments” by invoking Article 2 of the Association Agreement, which requires the parties to respect human rights and democratic principles.
“The EU is complicit in the crimes committed by the State of Israel”, said Alexis Deswaef, Vice President of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH). “All the warning lights are red and the EU is looking the other way”, he denounced, listing the decisions of the International Court of Justice and the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for two Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (see EUROPE 13385/4, 13337/15, 13529/3).
The very holding of the meeting between the EU and Israel outraged Bertrand Heilbronn, President of the European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine, who missed “a time when the EU was more dignified and refused to organise the Council after the 2008 Israeli attacks in Gaza”.
The NGOs also called for an end to arms trading with Israel and to trade with the settlements.
Claudio Francavilla, Human Rights Watch’s representative to the EU, concluded by deploring a European “double standard”. “We have seen the best of the EU on Ukraine (...) and the worst of the EU on Gaza”, he asserted, saying that the EU was brandishing the two-state solution “like a slogan” even though the Palestinian territory was “shrinking by the day”.
Despite the European position so far being deemed “disappointing”, Claudio Francavilla hoped that the Association Council meeting would be “a wake-up call to this collective nightmare” and that the EU would finally make “statements that are less disconnected from reality”.
In late 2024, the former EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell proposed to the Member States that they suspend political dialogue with Israel, without success (see EUROPE 13524/20). (Original version in French by Justine Manaud – intern)