The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and her team face growing criticism of the controversial EU-US tariff deal agreed in July. I am hoping for similar calls for accountability over the EU’s complicity in Israel’s unfolding genocide in Gaza. Such a reckoning is long overdue.
I have watched in despair for almost two years as European governments have done little or nothing while Israel has devastated Gaza through bombings, targeted strikes and forced starvation after the 7 October attack by Hamas. There are so many sanctions at the EU’s disposal which they are still refusing to deploy; so many levers they are refusing to pull. The bloc is Israel’s biggest trading partner, accounting for 32% of Israel’s total trade in 2024. Yet at every meeting, EU leaders and foreign ministers have failed to secure the majority needed to suspend the EU-Israel association agreement. This despite pressure from Spain, Ireland and Slovenia, and despite the fact the EU’s own human rights experts have indicated that Israel is in breach of the accord’s human rights obligations.
Even a modest commission proposal to partly suspend Israel from the EU’s €95bn Horizon Europe research programme – an initiative that the EU’s former foreign policy chief Josep Borrell has described as a “bad joke”, given the scale of Israel’s atrocities – remains blocked by Germany and Italy. Israeli exports to the EU actually rose in early 2024. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, says Berlin is now stopping exports of military equipment to Israel that could be used in Gaza. But this follows almost two years of unabated military support: arms export licences from Germany alone amounted to €485m of equipment in the 19 months after 7 October.
I understand Europe’s historical guilt, internal divisions and deep economic ties with Israel. But it is impossible to ignore a more uncomfortable truth: Europe’s political and moral paralysis over Gaza is intimately linked to the structural racism and violence which so many black, brown and Muslim Europeans face every day. It is clear to me that attitudes towards Gaza are shaped by an enduring colonial mentality that is embedded in the EU’s foreign, trade and migration policies. The same dehumanising logic applied to racialised Europeans and refugees from Africa, Asia and the Middle East is now in plain view in the EU’s abandonment of the Palestinian people.
Europe’s domestic and external biases are feeding off and sustaining each other. This connection is not abstract. It is glaringly visible in the disparity of treatment of Ukraine and Gaza. Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine was rightly condemned by the EU, which imposed severe and unprecedented sanctions on Moscow, gave more money to Kyiv and repeatedly condemned other states that did not follow suit. Palestinian lives, however, are treated as expendable, their suffering is minimised while children are robbed of their childhoods. The suffering in Gaza, framed as a humanitarian crisis rather than a deliberate political choice, is decontextualised, depoliticised and sanitised. EU policymakers should listen when the Palestinian-American academic Rashid Khalidi says this conflict is “the last colonial war in the modern age”.
The moral reckoning over the EU’s inaction on Gaza cannot be partial or piecemeal. It must include a recognition of how Europe’s past and present intersect, not only when it comes to Palestine but in many of its actions on the global stage. An EU that sees itself as a defender of international law and global justice should be willing to have these difficult conversations – in fact, it should encourage them. But the largely Eurocentric EU-policy circles see such talk as divisive.
Without serious self-examination and long overdue action, the EU’s very visible double standards will continue to undermine its democracy at home and its credibility abroad.
An updating of the 2020 anti-racism action plan could provide a way forward. But for that to happen, measures to combat the current alarming state of EU-wide discrimination must be backed by clear-eyed reflections on Europe’s history. This too is overdue. The action plan has lost momentum and a recent bureaucratic reshuffle has sidelined Michaela Moua, the first EU anti-racism coordinator, in what many fear could further undermine the bloc’s equality agenda in the coming years.
Still, public pressure and dissent within EU institutions, including among senior officials, is growing. Von der Leyen, who has been criticised for her unwavering pro-Israel bias, has come out against plans for an Israeli occupation of Gaza City. It is far from enough. Critics of the EU’s stance are right to decry its double standards, its betrayal of international law and the eroding of its own credibility. Israel’s plans for occupying the whole of Gaza must be stopped, food must be brought in urgently and there must be an immediate ceasefire.
Any serious reckoning over the EU’s inaction in Gaza will remain incomplete without confronting the structural racism and lingering colonial hierarchies that still shape Europe’s worldview. Gaza has stripped away the pretence. The EU’s policymakers must finally confront these truths, however harsh, and act to dismantle them.
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Shada Islam is a Brussels-based commentator on EU affairs. She runs New Horizons Project, a strategy, analysis and advisory company
