What's less clear is how far the decision will offset, in
Israeli government minds, an unrelated move which was anything but
welcome to Netanyahu, but which could, in the long run, mark a more
significant turning point in the EU's relations with Israel. New
guidelines, aimed at ensuring that EU funding does not go to
projects or institutions in Jewish settlements in the occupied West
Bank, have met with unremitting rage and hostility on the Israeli
right.
And while the pro-settler forces, so well represented in the
Netanyahu coalition, may exaggerate the guidelines' impact, they
are correct to be worried. For though the guidelines are largely
meant to reinforce existing policy, their publication is a start in
narrowing the embarrassing gap between rhetoric and reality which
has too long hobbled the European approach to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. By issuing them at all – especially
in a period when Washington is laying the basis for negotiations
between the two sides, and when there is all too often a taboo on
European pronouncements of any kind – the EU reminded Israel that
its tolerance for the relentless growth of settlements, illegal in
international law, has its limits.
What's more, the EU may even be tentatively, and almost
accidentally, groping towards the possibility of a role it has long
denied itself. The EU has always had a locus in the conflict – not
least but not only the €300m (£260m) a year it provides in direct
support to the Palestinian Authority. Its conventional wisdom has
long been that because the US has the central role in diplomacy,
the EU has none.
The EU guidelines were greeted with immediate protests in
Jerusalem that they would obstruct US efforts to bring the two
sides together. If anything, the opposite is the case. Despite the
progress made by the US State Secretary John Kerry towards "talks
about talks", and Netanyahu's decision to yield to a demand that
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been making for more than a
decade and release dozens of the Palestinians prisoners who have
been languishing in Israeli gaols since before the Oslo Accords 20
years ago, Abbas has been under severe pressure not to join talks
that many of his allies, as well as his Palestinian opponents, fear
will lead nowhere. All the signs are that the EU guidelines
encouraged him to do so – evidence of what Daniel Levy of the
European Council of Foreign Relations says has the potential to be
a "European role alongside the United States – a division of labour
– in the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."
The Israeli right claims that if the Palestinians think the EU
is going to put its own pressure on Israel, then it has no
incentive to negotiate. In fact, the more pressure Palestinians
think that the EU is prepared to exert – in accordance, after all,
with a half century of European opposition to the occupation and
settlement building – the more incentive they have not to alienate
their potential European allies by refusing to come to the
table.
For this leverage to have a real impact, however, it has to be
more than a mere spasm. Moves afoot deep in Brussels, for example,
to extend the British regime under which agricultural goods from
West Bank Jewish settlements have to be properly labelled in
supermarkets have yet to be completed. This has had some success in
Britain, where several big chains have stopped stocking such
produce as a result. But that should be extended not only across
the EU but to wine and manufactured goods. And the EU needs to do
more to enforce the EU-Israel treaty provisions which exclude
settlement goods from the tariff exemptions applied to goods from
Israel proper. All this is without any actual move to ban imports
of settlement goods, which an expert opinion by an eminent British
QC last year argued would indeed be legal.
But the EU has leverage on Israel too. Although you would not
know it from the furious reaction of the Netanyahu coalition last
week, nothing in the guidelines would mean a boycott of Israel, or
anything like it. If anything, robust efforts by the EU not to
support settlement activity would help to fill a space that
otherwise stands to be filled by campaigns for just such a
boycott.
Many Israelis – perhaps even a majority – can see that a boycott
of settlements is not the same as a boycott of Israel. Either way,
the chances are that a tougher EU line on settlements has every
chance of increasing – rather than reducing – public Israeli
interest in a deal with the Palestinians, over time. Yesterday the
mass circulation Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronot published an
eloquent article ridiculing the outcry against the justified EU
guidelines, blaming Netanyahu for "diplomatic inaction" and adding:
" How much more writing on the wall does the government need in
order to understand the urgent need for a peace arrangement?" The
author was not some leftist peacenik, but Dov Weisglass, Ariel
Sharon's closest lieutenant throughout his premiership.
