Several European countries recently imposed wide-ranging sanctions against products from what they define as “settlements,” including East Jerusalem and the Golan. The sanctions were apparently an angry, politically-driven response to issuing of tenders for construction in E-1 and to attacks by Jewish extremists, but also—as the European countries claim—with an eye to keeping alive the vision of a Palestinian state. Whatever their motives, the actual results are bound to be the painful opposite of what these measures are presumably meant to achieve (and those among us fulminating against European antisemitism, or an “Islamic takeover” of Europe, do not help Israel’s case). The sanctions would involve the morally debased practice of penalizing Jews as such; play into the hands of those in Israel who prefer to ignore the world; and worse, block the prospects of future peace efforts, by abandoning the Oslo framework of negotiations which Europe once supported and bolstering Palestinian territorial expectations that no Israeli government can agree to. Moreover, there is no parallel effort to bring the Palestinian Authority to account for policies, such as stipends for terrorists, which undermine the prospects of reconciliation.

Much the same can be said, with even greater sense of bitter folly, about the positions taken by the likes of the Green Party in the United Kingdom. What they actually do—driven by ideological obsessions and by sheer hate—is consign the Palestinian people to further frustration and prolonged misery as the call for the elimination of Zionism can never be realized. Nurturing such perverse hopes will only stand in the way of rational solutions.

Indiscriminate Sanctions and their Implementation Problems

Several European states—including the Netherlands and Great Britain, regarded in the past as friends of Israel—have instituted measures designed to boycott all “settlement” products. In the relevant legal framework, “settlements” include all of Jerusalem beyond the 1949 Armistice line; other areas under Israeli sovereignty (such as parts of the city of Modiin) which are on what was once the no-man’s-land between Israel and Jordan; and all of the Golan.

Some Israelis, including government figures, dismissed these measures as expressions of antisemitism and/or pandering to Islamists. Depictions of this nature, however, whether merited or not, are of little help in reversing these policies or rendering them inoperable. What needs to be pointed out, in rational conversation with the relevant governments, is that such steps belong to the category of what Barbara Tuchman called “The March of Folly”: their results are bound to be the opposite of what they were intended to achieve.

These measures lump together hundreds of thousands of Israelis—and more to the point, apply specifically to Jews as such who live in these areas, not because of what they did but because of who they are. After all, the idea is not to boycott the produce of Arabs living in the same areas, such as East Jerusalem, where economic life is fully integrated. In all likelihood, any serious attempt to implement these policies would lead to attempts to ascertain whether a person or a business from a given area is Jewish or not, a practice reminiscent of darker eras and highly questionable in both legal and moral terms.

All this is done without any pretense of parallel demands from the Palestinian Authority, as regards persistent practices such as the stipends rewarding convicted terrorists or the families of those killed—practices which have undercut the legitimacy of the peace process in the eyes of the Israeli public.

Paradoxical Political Outcomes  

In purely political terms, in the context of a heated Israeli election cycle (which may not be over even after 27 October), these European measures play right into the hands of the very elements they are supposed to punish. The parties of the nationalist right in Israel consistently advocate a world view that assumes unrelenting hostility on the part of “the world” (with some notable exceptions), not to mention the Arab world, and therefore call for aggressive self-reliance and proud disregard toward international opinions and institutions. The United Nations has long been busy, so to speak, proving them right: and current events in Europe— which they view with no distinction between governmental sanctions and the more extreme positions of the Greens in Britain or the radical left in France—serve their case as well.

With much hanging in the balance, both the content and the timing of the European measures are therefore highly questionable. In practice, they constitute a direct contribution to the political campaign of the parties and individual voices in Israel whose basic premise is, in the words of an old Israeli song, “the whole world is against us, but we shall overcome”. In other words, such policies add more heat than light to the internal Israeli debate. Moreover, this is happening at a time when there is finally a significant volume of voices from well within the veteran settler establishment who now roundly denounce the violent elements within their ranks—not because of European pressure (quite the opposite effect is at play) but because of moral and even religious considerations.

A Hindrance to Future Negotiations

Strategically, insofar as the ultimate and indeed explicit purpose of such European policies is to advance the prospects of Palestinian statehood (alongside Israel), the indiscriminate designation of all points beyond the June 4, 1967 lines as “settlements” is grievously self-defeating. It endorses, in effect, a Palestinian interpretation of the territorial issues at stake, in a manner that would leave little, if any, room for compromise. No conceivable Israeli government can consent to such terms, certainly not regarding partition of Jerusalem.

It is important to restate the basics: there is nothing sacrosanct about the pre-1967 lines. UNSCR 242, the governing document of the peace process, deliberately spoke of withdrawal from “territories” (not THE territories) and of “Secure and recognized borders”, whereas the 1949 armistice lines were neither. It is clearly, if implicitly, an invitation to negotiate under Chapter 6 (Pacific Settlement of Disputes) rather than under Chapter 7 (Breaches of the Peace and Acts of Aggression) of the UN Charter. Only a sober willingness on both sides to compromise, based on certain realities on both sides—as suggested by President George Bush in his letter of 14 April 2004 to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, in the context of the latter’s disengagement plan—will ever produce a stable peace.

In the past, Europe had lent its support to a process, generically referred to as Oslo, that left open the prospect of future negotiations on borders and settlements. Now, however, the effective European endorsement of the Palestinians’ deliberate misreading of 242 (which does NOT mean June 4, 1967, even if they repeat this claim again and again makes it significantly less likely that such a necessary compromise will ever be reached. How can a Palestinian negotiator—from a position of strategic weakness, which often leads the unequal partner to latch on to external positions—accept less than what “Europe” (or at least parts of it) openly declares to be in his domain? Making peace less likely is thus another example of what the American historian Theodor White used to call “the law of unexpected consequences”. Such European positions also undermine the remnants of trust among Israelis—regardless of what the coming elections bring—in the ability of the international community to contribute to conflict management, let alone conflict resolution.

Denying Israel’s Right to Exist is a reckless disservice to the Palestinians

The same is true, with an even greater degree of magnitude, of those elements in Europe, from a Spanish government minister to the ascending Green Party in Britain, who now openly call for Zionism to be eradicated and for Israel to be dismantled. As Prof. Efraim Inbar has explained on these pages, they are driven by a poisonous mix of woke “awareness,” post-colonial guilt, Islamist or radical revolutionary ideology, religious urges and simply sheer hate. The proponents of such propositions cannot be reasoned with. Young minds on campus and elsewhere who are the target of their persuasion need to hear a counter-argument, cast not by way of tossing back insults and accusations of antisemitism (true as these may be) but rather in terms of what would benefit, and what would gravely harm, the very people with whom they are told they should identify, namely the Palestinians.

The logic is clear and simple: selling the Palestinians the fantasy of Israel’s removal from the map (a fantasy fed by some elements in Western discourse, as well as by Iran’s overt posture) is like selling a minor hallucinogenic drugs. From the safety of a party conference or a university campus it consigns the Palestinians to an endless, bloody struggle that cannot possibly be won. It was President Barrack Obama after all (not Donald Trump) who made it quite clear that Israel is not going away anywhere. The real-world consequences of this fantasy are already evident and those who continue to toy with it in the West are complicit in the results.