Palestinians fleeing the fighting in Gaza City head south along the coastal road west of Nuseirat, Gaza Strip last week. Photo / Saher Alghorra, the New York Times
European nations are lining up behind a plan to recognise Palestine as a state at this week’s United Nations General Assembly in New York.
Top officials widely condemn Israel’s actions in the Gaza Strip, and some have even begun to call the war “genocide”.
Big talk has yet to lead to big action.
The European Union has proposed higher tariffs on Israeli goods, but it is not clear if that will happen.
Other efforts to punish the Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have stalled amid opposition, notably from Germany.
Actions by individual countries have also fallen short of the rhetoric.
Attempts to funnel aid into Gaza have been limited, even as starvation grips the territory.
And nations have been accepting only a trickle of asylum-seekers from Gaza, with immigration often a domestic political flashpoint.
Belgium has more Palestinian asylum applicants than anywhere else in Europe, likely because of its relatively permissive immigration practices and large existing Palestinian community.
Even there, applying for asylum can be difficult. Many hopefuls have been rejected this year.
While Belgium has been evacuating its citizens and the family members of its own residents and refugees from Gaza, the country closed its evacuation list, which then numbered about 500 people, in April.
Bahjat Madi, 34, from the southern Gaza city of Rafah, has been in Belgium since 2022 and has been a resident since 2024. He is witnessing the fallout firsthand: Madi’s father is still in Gaza, he said, struggling to get out.
“I want to do anything for my father to be alive,” said Madi, who is bringing a court case to get his father’s visa application accepted remotely.
His father is seeking a humanitarian visa but is required to apply at the consulate in Jerusalem, which is all but impossible for someone trapped in Gaza.
If he can get the visa, he might eventually be added to an evacuation list. It is a long shot and could take years.
“I want to talk to myself at night and say, ‘I do my best,’” Madi said. “But it’s not enough.”
For policymakers, the question is whether Europe will turn words of condemnation and concern into more powerful action.
European public opinion has turned against the Israeli conduct of the war, but long-standing alliances and fraught political histories have kept nations like Germany and Italy from supporting major action.
“I haven’t seen any moment where such international momentum has built up in such a short time, so I think there’s a real opening,” said Kristina Kausch, deputy managing director for the German Marshall Fund South, a think-tank focused on international relations.
“But we will have to see what tangible commitments come, beyond the wording.
“This is not only about Palestinians,” she added. “This is about whether the West, and Europe, can uphold international law and uphold multilateralism.”
Luxembourg announced last week that it would join Belgium, Britain and a raft of other nations in recognising a Palestinian state at the UN meeting in New York, a push spearheaded by President Emmanuel Macron of France that is meant to increase pressure on Israel.
Last week, a UN commission investigating the war in Gaza said Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians, a topic poised to be prominent at the UN meeting. Israel calls such an accusation “distorted and false”.
Some individual European nations have taken more concrete actions.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain recently pledged a permanent ban on the sale of weapons and ammunition to Israel, for instance, after cancelling a contract worth €700 million to buy rocket launchers.
Belgium recently announced plans for a ban on imports from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Such moves have had little impact on the course of the war. And other measures — like helping people to flee the region — are politically more difficult.
After big flows of Syrian refugees in 2015 helped to fuel the rise of the far-right in Germany and elsewhere, countries have been cautious about accepting displaced Palestinians in large numbers.
That has left many from Gaza either trapped in place or stuck in limbo in neighbouring countries like Egypt.
Nations have argued that there are limits to what any one country can do and have urged the EU, with its economic and diplomatic might, to respond.
Taken together, the bloc is Israel’s biggest trading partner, and in 2024, accounted for 32% of Israel’s total trade in goods.
“It is really an emergency for Europe to take action,” Maxime Prévot, the Belgian Foreign Minister, said in an interview this month.
“Many, in public opinion, do not understand why Europe is so timid.”
Bloc-wide efforts have struggled to get off the ground.
When the EU’s diplomatic branch conducted a review this year of a treaty that governs the bloc’s relations with Israel, it found indications that Israel had breached its human rights obligations under the pact.
After that conclusion, the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, proposed that Europe’s political leaders could ban Israel from participating in a research-funding programme called Horizon Europe. Even that step struggled to garner enough support among member states.
More than 200 former bloc ambassadors and diplomatic staff members wrote to EU leaders last month expressing their “profound disappointment” in the failure to pressure Israel more effectively.
Now, the commission is making its biggest push yet, attempting to suspend part of the bloc’s trade agreement with Israel.
Doing so would remove preferential treatment from billions of euros of trade.
“What is happening in Gaza has shaken the conscience of the world,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the commission, said in a recent speech.
The proposal signals a condemnation of what Israel is doing. Because passing it would require a large majority — but not unanimity — analysts said it was possible that it could become policy.
That remains far from guaranteed.
Germany in particular, with its Holocaust history, has hesitated to criticise Israel too overtly. Italy, too, has been reluctant.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany warned last week that criticism of Israel was “increasingly a pretext under which the poison of anti-Semitism is spread”.
Merz suggested on Friday that his Government would decide by the start of next month whether to support the EU’s attempts to punish Israel.
Kaja Kallas, the bloc’s top diplomat, suggested last week that the challenge in finding agreement might persist.
“The political lines are very much in the place where they have been so far,” Kallas said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jeanna Smialek
Photograph by: Saher Alghorra
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