The proposal to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement has been shelved in Luxembourg. For its three sponsors, the humiliation is complete.
Johann Wadephul © Mena Today
It was meant to be a bold diplomatic statement. It ended as an embarrassing defeat.
Spain, Slovenia and Ireland arrived at Tuesday's EU foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg demanding a debate on suspending the bloc's trade agreement with Israel, invoking what they called a "genocidal war" on Gaza. They left empty-handed.
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul dismissed the proposal as "inappropriate", insisting on "constructive dialogue" with Israel rather than economic punishment. His Italian counterpart Antonio Tajani was even blunter: after the meeting, he confirmed the bid had been definitively shelved.
The defeat is particularly damaging for Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, whose Middle East policy has long prioritised domestic political signalling over strategic coherence, maintaining conspicuous softness toward Hamas, Hezbollah and Tehran while leading the charge against Israel in European forums. He attempted to position himself as the moral conscience of EU foreign policy. Berlin and Rome had other ideas.
The broader lesson from Luxembourg is uncomfortable for the trio: deploying legally contested language like "genocidal war" in official diplomacy, while failing to explain how suspending a trade deal would help a single civilian, is not moral leadership. It is political theatre, and Europe's most consequential powers are no longer willing to applaud.
Sheikh Rafeh Halabi, a senior figure in Israel’s Druze community who presents himself as dean of the descendants of the Prophet (Naqib al-Ashraf) for Jerusalem and president of the Jerusalem branch of an international human-rights organization, has sent a letter to U.S. President Donald Trump calling for immediate American action to halt what he describes as the starvation and extermination of Druze in Syria’s Sweida province.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said on Wednesday that the government does not plan to deport Palestinians from Gaza, after two Israeli ministers this month floated proposals for the mass removal of Palestinians from the coastal territory.
Israel will open its first embassy in Slovenia on Wednesday in a sign of warming relations after populist Janez Jansa formed a centre-right government following elections in March.
To make this website run properly and to improve your experience, we use cookies. For more detailed information, please check our Cookie Policy.
Necessary cookies enable core functionality. The website cannot function properly without these cookies, and can only be disabled by changing your browser preferences.
