The EU-Israel Association Agreement regulates political, economic and trade ties. It includes human rights clauses. The EU refuses to suspend it. The European organizations of the International Socialist League (ISL) push for a total and immediate break with Israel and fight for a Free and Socialist Palestine from the river to the sea. From the Global Sumud Flotilla, Cele Fierro showed the contrast between the activists who denounce the complicities and the EU that protagonizes and sustains them.
By Ruben Tzanoff
A perverse agreement from the outset
The agreement is the framework that regulates political, economic and trade relations. It is a bilateral treaty that was signed in 1995 and entered into effect in 2000 to establish a broad and preferential cooperation.
Among its key points, it eliminates or reduces tariffs on industrial goods and facilitates agricultural trade, integrating Israel into the European market in many sectors. It includes collaboration in areas such as research, technology, energy, transportation, culture and education. It establishes formal channels of dialogue on foreign policy, security and regional issues. And it contains a clause linking the agreement to respect for human rights and democratic principles.
Zionism has strategic European allies
Last fall, in the face of popular pressure, the European Commission discussed suspending part of the Agreement, sanctioning two extremist Israeli ministers, violent settlers and halting the allocation of bilateral aid.
Now Spain, Ireland and Slovenia have proposed to suspend the Agreement, but the European Council ruled it out, citing the lack of consensus among its members.
Germany and Italy called any action at the European level against the Netanyahu government inappropriate. It is worth reviewing how they did so. German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul expressed criticism of the death penalty and settler violence and called for a “Two-State” solution, “but this must be done through a critical and constructive dialogue with Israel.” His statement oscillates between hypocrisy and the stupidity of trying to change a state structurally colonizing, aggressive and racist.
For his part, the Italian Minister Antonio Tajani said: “I do not believe that blocking a trade agreement is a useful tool”, because it affects the Israeli population. Has he not realized that it is the Palestinian people who are being attacked, and, to a large extent, with the support of Israeli citizens? Thus, the suspension of the automatic renewal of the Defense Agreement already implemented in Italy by Giorgia Meloni appears as a simple local political maneuver that was not even implemented in Luxembourg at the EU level.
Even Spain, which advocated the suspension of the agreement as a sign against the Netanyahu government, ended up stating through José Manuel Albares that it was open to accepting other measures, or only to changes in the trade section.
The EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Kaja Kallas, closed the issue by stating: “Our debate will continue”, “Let us focus on those issues on which there is agreement, and there are many”, turning the page as if the Palestinians had time to wait and genocide was a minor issue.
The EU with a human mask and a complicit face
The European Union has once again shown its true face of complicity with the State of Israel. While the Palestinian people remain in a dramatic situation, the refusal to suspend the Association Agreement with Israel, even partially, is not only “lack of consensus”, it is strategic complicity with the support of a colonial and genocidal State.
Because they know perfectly well what is happening: genocide, ethnic cleansing, territorial occupation, destruction in Gaza, attempted annexation of the West Bank, humanitarian blockade, invasion of southern Lebanon, war against Iran and aggression against neighboring countries.
The Agreement not only establishes economic benefits that sustain the aggressiveness of the State of Israel, but also ignores and legitimizes its crimes against Palestine committed over more than 75 years; that is why we reject it from its perverse origin, even more so with the current genocide in progress.
Often the justifications for the decisions taken are based on the consensus mechanisms that govern the functioning of the highest executive bodies of the EU. Some require unanimity, others a qualified majority in the Council and to overcome a complex web of approvals that almost always yield the same result: inaction or reactionary measures that are aggravated when genocide is underway.
Hypocrisy goes hand in hand with imperialist politics. The EU trades with Israel while talking about human rights. The same agreement they refuse to suspend today demands respect for them, but when Israel violates them, they look the other way.
Total rupture now, on the way to a bottom-up solution
The European organizations that make up the ISL call for the broadest mobilization in the streets to demand the total and immediate rupture of all diplomatic, commercial, military, cultural, educational and all other types of agreements and relations of the EU with the State of Israel. If it does not do so, there is no reason why governments should not do so on their own, in a sovereign manner.
Keep an eye on the Flotilla
We also call to resume and deepen the solidarity with Palestine and the support to the Global Sumud Flotilla with mobilizations, strikes, boycotts and other actions, as we do from the ISL in thirteen European countries. In this sense, in the face of commercial complicities, the Flotilla has given a new demonstration that it is not willing to ignore them, carrying out a maritime blockade of the mega ship MSC Maya in the Mediterranean.
Speaking on behalf of the ISL, Cele Fierro reflected the contrast between the Flotilla that denounces commercial complicities and the EU that sustains them by refusing to annul or even suspend the Agreement with Israel .
Beyond the initiatives, denunciations and demands, we stress that the fundamental solution will only come by defeating the State of Israel, within the framework of the Socialist Revolution in the Middle East, so that the workers and the peoples rule. In the face of the failed solution of “two states” we are for a Free Palestine from the river to the sea, a single, secular, non-racist, democratic and socialist Palestine.
