(JNS) The European Union’s decision to sanction violent Israelis living in Judea and Samaria (commonly known as the West Bank) is not a measured diplomatic signal. It is a declaration—implicit but unmistakable—that Jews hold no enforceable historical rights to the land they have inhabited for millennia.
To be clear: Acts of settler violence are indefensible and deserve unequivocal condemnation. But this is not what Europe’s sanctions address, nor what this essay concerns. Although the sanctions remain, for now, largely symbolic—the individuals targeted generally hold neither bank accounts nor significant assets in Europe—the underlying trajectory is more consequential.
Beyond their limited immediate effect, such measures gradually establish a normative framework in which Jewish presence beyond the 1949 armistice lines is treated not merely as disputed but as inherently illegitimate. The concern is therefore less about the sanctions themselves than the long-term political and moral language they normalize.
The logic at work here echoes terra nullius, the colonial fiction that rendered territories legally empty to justify their seizure. Brussels is not adjudicating a border dispute. It is asserting, extraterritorially, who may claim belonging on land outside its own jurisdiction.
This is not without precedent in European institutions. UNESCO’s attempts to sever Jerusalem from Jewish history followed the same template. So did French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent assertion that Israel owes its existence solely to the UN vote of partition in 1947—a formulation that erases 3,000 years of prior history and, by implication, places a question mark over the entire Zionist project, not just the settlements.
Europe is not converging over a two-state solution. It is converging, at least symbolically, on “from the river to the sea.”
The strategic incoherence compounds the moral failure. While the United States—through the Abraham Accords and the architecture being built around them—treats the Middle East as a system of overlapping interests and emerging alignments, Europe remains locked in a Cold War reading: regional stability depends entirely on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that resolution has one form. This is more theology than sober geopolitical analysis. And it places European foreign policy on this issue closer to Tehran and Hezbollah than to Washington or Abu Dhabi.
The European Union did recently sanction the Palestinian Authority over incitement in school textbooks—an act its officials cite as proof of evenhandedness. It proves nothing of the sort. A policy defined by Macron’s anti-Israel rhetoric, deliberate ambiguity around the word “genocide,” and the exclusion of a democratically elected government from multilateral forums is not balanced. It is confused. Confusion at this scale, in this region, has consequences.
The domestic consequences also deserve attention. European Jewish citizens watching their governments treat Israeli Jews—not Israeli policies, but Israeli Jews present on ancestral land—as a sanctionable category are drawing rational conclusions. Antisemitism does not require explicit animus to metastasize. It requires legitimization: the slow normalization of the idea that Jewish presence, in certain places, is inherently illegitimate. Europe is providing exactly that.
The deeper problem is not bad faith. It is obsolescence.
Europe has lost the ability to read a region that has moved on without it—a region where Emirati, Druze, Lebanese opposition and Iranian civil society voices are reshaping the landscape in ways that fit no European framework. Rather than update its model, Europe is doubling down on it, sanctioning its way toward irrelevance.
A continent that cannot distinguish between engagement and abdication will not have a hand in shaping the Middle East’s future.
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