Eurasia Press & News
The recent sanctions imposed by the UK and its allies on Israeli ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich were heralded in some quarters as a long-overdue moral stance against rising extremism within Israel’s leadership.
Yet beneath the surface of this headline-grabbing gesture lies a far more calculated and cynical strategy – one that reflects not a principled reckoning with Israeli impunity, but a desperate attempt by Western powers to maintain the appearance of action while enabling the very atrocities they now claim to condemn.
These carefully choreographed measures, limited in scope and hollow in consequence, reveal a deeper truth: that for all their rhetoric, these governments remain unwilling to confront the structural, societal, and institutional engines of Israel’s ongoing system of apartheid and genocidal warfare against Palestinians.
Earlier in June, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway took an unprecedented step that broke an entrenched taboo. The five governments imposed sanctions on two far-right ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government: Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Until not long ago, this move would have been unthinkable.
Yet this seemingly bold action was met with ridicule by multiple experts, especially Israelis, who described it as “baby steps”, “cowardly”, “naïve”, or a deliberate “manoeuvre” to “let Israel off the hook,” pointing to the devil in the details.
The same can be said about the EU’s recent sudden awakening and sharpening of tone vis-à-vis Israel, according to multiple diplomats and experts who spoke to The New Arab. This includes, most prominently, the EU’s announcement in late May of a review of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, and whether Israel is violating Article 2 on respect for human rights.
Selective and carefully choreographed empty sanctions
Experts were quick to notice that the sanctions on Ben-Gvir and Smotrich only penalise them for “statements” and not actions or decisions, and that even the incriminating evidence was limited to their “inflammatory and extremist statements” in the West Bank and not Gaza.
Both are deliberate choices to give those governments greater room for manoeuvre. By limiting the scope to the West Bank and inciteful statements rather than actions, the UK and its partners distinguish between the two far-right ministers and the Israeli government, to take action only against the former.
Had they included “extremist statements” on Gaza, for instance, this would have incriminated the entire government, as virtually every single minister in Netanyahu’s cabinet has unambiguously made statements that amount to genocidal incitement, such as calls to nuke, starve, flatten, or depopulate Gaza.
Similarly, if the sanctions were penalising actions, such as the very settlement expansion the UK and its partners condemned in their statement, it would have implicated the government and chain of command executing those decisions.
This would have necessitated going after Netanyahu, his security cabinet, Israeli generals and officers, settler leaders, settlements’ regional councils, and other organisations involved in ethnically cleansing Palestinian lands to build settlements on top of their ruins.
At a minimum, if those countries are seriously concerned about settlement expansion, they would have complied with the ICJ advisory opinion of July 2024 on the illegality of Israel’s occupation, which necessitates banning all imports from those illegal settlements and sanctioning companies and financial institutions working there.
The sanctions also draw another clear distinction between the two ministers and Israeli society, where the UK and its partners emphasised “shared ties, values and commitment to [Israelis’] security and future”. This is despite a clear and overwhelming majority of Israelis voicing support for genocide, ethnic cleansing, and population transfer.
Furthermore, the sanctions themselves – travel bans and asset freezes – have practically no impact on the two targeted ministers, as neither was frequently travelling outside of Israel.
It is similar to the UK’s recent decision to merely suspend negotiations on another free trade agreement with Israel, while at the same time, the British prime minister was threatening, behind closed doors, the ICC chief prosecutor against issuing arrest warrants for Netanyahu and providing weapons and logistical and intel support to Israel.
In other words, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are easy targets for the UK and its partners to pick up on to pretend that the problem is personal – i.e. a few bad apples – rather than institutional or societal. Both ministers are beyond the pale even for most Israelis to care much about their assets or travel plans.
EU review of trade deal, but no suspension
In late May, and as a response to Israel banning all aid from entering Gaza for nearly 80 days, the EU announced a review of whether Israel is violating Article 2 on human rights of the association agreement that gives Israel a privileged partnership with the EU, its largest trading partner.
This would be, however, the third review in 12 months of the same thing. Two earlier reviews were carried out last year by EUSR Olof Skoog, both of which incriminated Israel, yet were followed by no action.
A senior European official told The New Arab the EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, has said behind closed doors that “one has to be insane to think Israel isn’t violating Article 2”.
The same official added that Kallas had asked the Netherlands, which requested the third review, if they would support suspending the association agreement with Israel should the review find clear human rights violations.
However, the Dutch government said no, they only support the review and not the suspension. This means the review is merely a manoeuvre to buy time, or at best a warning shot to Israel that it’s going too far, without following that shot with any credible ultimatum.
Furthermore, two European diplomats told The New Arab that the upcoming review’s conclusions would only be delivered orally to the member states rather than in writing, to further evade compliance.
A top European Union official had told TNA last year that when he printed and compiled damning UN reports and tried to give it to EU heads of states, many refused to even take them, calling the UN “biased against Israel.” Such a move aims to maintain plausible deniability vis-à-vis Israel’s genocide.
Similarly, other efforts inside the EU to push for genuine measures against Israel have consistently hit a dead end; even when it comes to steps as simple as imposing sanctions on a couple more settlers.
Two EU officials in Brussels told The New Arab that member states keep demanding that if Europe sanctions a settler, they should sanction Hamas leaders first. They also insist that such sanctions against Hamas need to take place well in advance of punitive measures against any settlers so as not to imply any “moral equivalency” between Israel and Hamas.
Even then, European states “would keep moving the goalpost” until the initiative dies out, an EU official concluded.
Recognition of Palestine? Not so fast
Another step European states have been threatening is to recognise the state of Palestine as a response to Israel destroying any chances of the two-state solution. While such recognition would have no practical impact on the ground, it is still considered a strong symbolic gesture to show solidarity with the Palestinians.
Saudi Arabia has been pushing European states to recognise Palestine at the now-cancelled Saudi-French conference at the UN in June. The conference was initially meant to happen during a ceasefire in Gaza to discuss the enclave’s reconstruction and the future of Palestinians and Israelis.
However, after Netanyahu resumed the genocide in March, recognition became the only substantial thing to aim for at the conference to make a grand announcement.
France killed that idea by conditioning recognition of Palestine on disarming Hamas, exiling its leadership and members out of Gaza, and preventing it from playing any future role in Palestinian governance.
A European diplomat told The New Arab, “Israel has no right to demand disarming Palestinians, since the ICJ ruled its occupation illegal, which gives it no right to self-defence in the occupied territory while it gives Palestinians the right to armed resistance”.
The French government knows Hamas would not accept those prerequisites, as the group conditions its disarmament and dissolution on Israel ending the occupation, which makes such French conditions a trick to avoid recognising Palestine by using Hamas as an excuse.
What explains the new EU position?
In late May, Palestinians in Gaza felt encouraged by a sudden slew of strong-worded European statements calling out Israel’s starvation policy. Even Germany broke its silence and said Israel’s war “can no longer be justified”.
“It seems like there is some momentum building up,” Ibrahim, a computer engineer in northern Gaza, told The New Arab. That hope, however, quickly died out when no action followed this rare European criticism of Israel.
What pushed European leaders to speak up after nearly 20 months of livestreamed genocide was not a sudden realisation of atrocities being committed but rather stemmed from two other reasons.
First, European leaders expected Gaza coverage and solidarity with the enclave to fade out. However, Israel overreaching and escalating atrocities did the opposite. “The shift in public opinion across Europe after 19 months of seeing babies blown to pieces” created pressure on EU leaders to break their silence, a senior European diplomat told The New Arab.
Second was Israeli leaders becoming “unhinged” by a emboldened sense of invincibility and impunity following Trump’s victory, that they “don’t even recognise anymore that saying openly you will commit an indisputable war crime that cannot be rationalised by your most fervent advocate is different from merely committing those same war crimes while denying them,” a senior European diplomat told The New Arab.
The diplomat explained that European leaders previously tried to brush off or trivialise Israeli genocidal incitement, such as “human animals” or “Amalek”, as “rage in reaction to [Oct 7]”.
However, more than 19 months later, the continuation of those statements made it increasingly difficult for the EU to look the other way. Especially since Israeli announcements such as blocking humanitarian aid or “destroying everything that remains of Gaza” are “much more precise and specific, also in the legal sense” than dehumanising incitement.
The diplomat explained that “the same happened when Gaddafi gave his famous speech that triggered the NATO intervention and made it difficult even for Russia and China to veto the UNSC resolution”.
In the case of Israel, however, experts believe European governments are still trying to buy time through rhetorical statements that serve as PR stunts to save face and register opposition to Israel’s genocide, while doing nothing serious to stop it.
In the end, the UK sanctions on Ben-Gvir – like the EU’s toothless reviews, the suspended trade negotiations, and the hollow gestures toward Palestinian recognition – are not bold ruptures with the status quo but deft manoeuvres to preserve it.
They isolate caricatures of extremism to shield the broader machinery of state violence and settler colonialism from meaningful scrutiny. By targeting individuals rather than institutions, statements rather than actions, and optics rather than accountability, Western powers continue to treat Palestinian suffering as a crisis to manage, not a moral emergency to end.
Until these governments are willing to confront the totality of Israel’s apartheid regime – and their own complicity in it – such gestures will remain little more than political theatre, staged not for justice, but for plausible deniability.
