Crystal ball: EU will do nothing about Israel on Monday

I have a crystal ball and I know what EU foreign ministers will decide to do about Israel in Brussels on Monday (13 July): nothing, again.

The proposal on the table is to restrict or ban trade with illegal Israeli settlers, which would require Germany or Italy to flip against Israel if it was to go through, in order to form a qualified majority in the EU Council.

But for his part, German foreign minister Johann Wadephul said in Berlin on Friday it would be enough for the EU to verbally condemn settlers, while he wanted to focus on the future of Gaza and new Lebanon peace talks instead.

“All German governments to date – and we ourselves – have consistently issued statements to this effect [condemning settler violence and expansion],“ he told press, self-approvingly.

The Gaza and Lebanon issues “will … be my key contribution at the EU foreign ministers’ meeting on Monday,“ Wadephul said.

In another sign of Germany’s Holocaust-blinded loyalties, its upper house, the Bundesrat, passed a law, also on Friday, that could see people jailed for five years if they said Israel “did not have a right to exist”, while leaving it OK to call for Palestinian erasure (as Israeli ministers have done and their armed forces are doing on the ground).

And as for Italy, its foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, was too busy wallowing in glee to mention EU sanctions, because Israel agreed to hold the US-brokered Lebanon peace talks in Rome on Tuesday and Wednesday.

It showed Italy had an “authoritative and credible role on the international political scene“, Tajani said on X on 7 July, while leaving it till Monday in Brussels to say EU sanctions would put the Lebanon negotiations at risk.

Wadephul, Tajani, and other EU friends of Israel, such as Czech foreign minister Petr Macinka, will also say there are more reasons to keep doing nothing, my crystal ball indicates.

These will be:

capitals must study the settler-ban proposal, so EU foreign ministers cannot decide before their next formal meeting on 12 October; the EU should wait until after Israeli elections (27 October) and government formation (another two months, based on the 2022 election timeline), as foreign sanctions could help Israeli hardliners keep power; sanctions on settler exports would impose an undue bureaucratic burden on normal Israeli exporters, in terms of EU compliance.

It is not hard to debunk this.

The EU issued 895 statements on Israel between 2017 and 2026, 38 percent of which were negative, according to the Jewish People Policy Institute in Israel, while the Israeli settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem grew from 620,000 to over 750,000 in the same period, including 47 new settlements since 2022.

Israel has occupied 608 square kilometres of Lebanon since 2023 and won’t give it back, no matter how fawning Tajani or Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni might be in Rome, especially after the Iran war just reignited.

Capitals have had since September 2025 to study anti-settler sanctions, when the European Commission first tabled options.

If Israelis freely re-elected genocidal extremists just to stick two fingers up to the EU they needed to be pressured all the more.

And Israeli authorities were, in any case, quite happy to bear the bureaucratic burden of systematically falsifying the origin of settler imports to Europe.

All that leaves EU friends of Palestine/human rights and rule of law to act together in a coalition of the willing, as France, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Spain have done and Belgium might also.

Meanwhile, as I don’t live in Germany, it leaves me free to ponder the question if Israel has a right to exist, according to my own intellect and conscience, instead of a Christian Democratic Union gag-order.

And my answer is: Yes, of course it does, within its UN-recognised 1967 borders, while giving its Arab population the same rights as Jews, since both are equally human.

But I’m not sure if that Israel exists anymore.