Foreign ministers are to discuss Israel trade sanctions in Luxembourg next week, as EU waits for details of Hungary’s new approach.
Andrew Rettman
EU foreign ministers will discuss Israel trade sanctions next week, while waiting for Hungary’s new foreign policy to take shape.
Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Slovenia, and Spain had called for the move in past meetings.
And “I expect indeed my minister to bring that up during the discussions, and not only them”, said an EU diplomat from the group.
They are to bring it up during Middle East talks by EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg next Tuesday (21 April).
The Italian parliament was also briefed on the potential measures in Rome on Wednesday (15 April), where a senior foreign ministry official, Maria Tripodi, said the government would take a “serious and balanced position” on the issue at next week’s meeting.
“I expect the EU foreign service is having discussions with member states” to test appetite for the move, a second EU diplomat said, but EU officials declined to confirm this.
The trade sanctions entail suspending an EU-Israel association agreement by a qualified majority vote (QMV) in the EU Council.
This would require two Israeli allies, Germany and Italy, to change their mind.
But Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni imposed defence sanctions on Israel on Tuesday to distance herself from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after he became toxic to Italian centre-right voters.
Italy also smashed its national ‘minimum threshold’ in an EU citizens’ petition with over 1 million backers filed this week in Brussels in a sign of the wider public mood.
And 49 former Italian ambassadors signed a public letter calling for EU sanctions on Israel, also on Wednesday.
Germany did not reach its EU-petition ‘threshold’ and there is resistance to EU sanctions also among German conservative EU officials, such as the European Commission’s co-ordinator for the fight against antisemitism, Katerina von Schnurbein.
But 18 former German ambassadors and senior ex-EU officials also signed the public letter, together with dozens of ex-ambassadors from Belgium and Sweden, out of 350 signatories in total.
And Israel’s extremist finance minister Bezalel Smotrich made its image also more toxic in Germany, with a Holocaust-slur on X on Monday against German centre-right chancellor Friedrich Merz.
The full EU sanctions package first proposed by the EU Commission last September also included: suspending Israel from the Horizon science programme (decided by QMV), blacklisting Smotrich and extremist Israeli security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (decided by EU unanimity), and blacklisting more extremist West Bank settlers (unanimity).
Magyar veto?
Hungary had vetoed the blacklistings under its outgoing pro-Netanyahu prime minister Viktor Orbán.
And incoming centre-right prime minister Péter Magyar has not made his Israel foreign policy clear since his landslide election win on Sunday.
His Tisza party’s press team did not reply to EUobserver’s questions for his incoming foreign minister, Anita Orbán, on Wednesday.
But Magyar has committed to overturning one pro-Israel Orbán policy – blocking Hungary’s exit from the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Magyar will take power in early May, while Hungary was to exit the ICC on 2 June, after Orbán set wheels in motion to shield Netanyahu from a war-crimes warrant.
Magyar also campaigned on return to rule of law in Hungary.
And both the EU citizens’ petition and ex-EU ambassadors’ letter cited chapter and verse of EU-Israel association agreement’s Article 2 human-rights clause.
