Belgium’s foreign minister accused the European Commission on Monday of taking “insufficient” action against trade with illegal Israeli settlements as a push to clamp down divides EU countries.
EU foreign ministers gathered in Brussels are due to discuss a paper written by Ursula von der Leyen’s EU executive, and seen by POLITICO, that pitches various options for limiting trade with the West Bank settlements, including “prohibitive tariffs” and a licensing system.
But this paper falls short of Belgium’s demands for concrete proposals to ban or limit trade, according to Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot — who said the Commission had circulated the paper to give countries a “bone to chew on.”
“The European Commission has finally proposed some options over two pages,” Prévot told journalists on his way into the Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Brussels. “So this is the feeling they have thrown out a bone to chew on rather than any real will to go forward.”
Prévot went on to say that the measures were “largely insufficient compared to the need to be a credible actor on the geopolitical level in the Israeli-Palestinian situation — which, I regret to say, the European Union has not been for some time.”
The push to clamp down on Israel’s illegal settlements was due to loom large at the gathering of foreign ministers, with a group of countries — including Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and Ireland — seeking to form a majority to force the Commission to table a formal proposal that can be put to a vote.
Speaking to journalists on her way into the meeting, chief EU diplomat Kaja Kallas said the situation with illegal settlements needs to be addressed and that she sided with the European Council’s legal service against the Commission on whether tariffs on the settlements are trade measures or sanctions. The difference is that the former requires only a qualified majority of states to pass, while the latter requires unanimity.
Ministers from the Netherlands and Spain also called for an EU-wide halt to trade with the settlements, pointing out that their own countries had already taken bilateral measures.
“Spain has banned these imports bilaterally. The European Union needs to do it too,” said Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares Bueno.