Europe is writing itself out of the Middle East

Twice in six months, the EU has tried to suspend its trade agreement with Israel. Twice, a handful of member states have blocked the move. The most recent attempt came on April 21, in Luxembourg, when Spain, Ireland and Slovenia pushed for suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement under Article 2, the human rights clause.

Germany, Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Austria held the line. The proposal will return at the next Foreign Affairs Council, and the one after that. That is how Brussels works now. The question is not asked once. It is asked again and again, until an answer comes back that someone likes.

The case for suspension rests on Article 2 of the Association Agreement, the human rights clause that frames the EU’s relationship with each of its Mediterranean partners. European officials supporting the move speak of a line that must be drawn, a principle that must be enforced – an argument that is powerful as long as one doesn’t look at what else Europe is doing in the region.

Seven Euro-Mediterranean Association Agreements are in force – with Tunisia, Morocco, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria and Lebanon. All seven contain the same Article 2 clause.

Consider Lebanon. The EU-Lebanon Association Agreement entered into force in April 2006, binding both parties to respect for democratic principles and fundamental human rights. For more than a decade after that, the country was under the effective political and military control of Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organisation by the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Arab League.

From 2012 onward, Hezbollah dispatched thousands of fighters to Syria to serve as Bashar al-Assad’s shock troops, participating in the sieges of Homs, Qusayr and Aleppo, in the Ghouta chemical weapons campaign, and in the systematic ethnic cleansing of Sunni civilians along the Lebanese border. The EU’s response was to maintain the Association Agreement in full, allocate over €2.4 billion in financial aid to Lebanon since 2012, and never once invoke Article 2.

Or consider Egypt. Last year the Commission signed a €7.4 billion partnership with Cairo and sent €5 billion directly to the Egyptian treasury, even as the European Parliament passed four urgency resolutions documenting mass arbitrary detention, torture and deaths in custody.

None of it triggered a review of the Association Agreement; the Commission instead hosted its first full summit with President Sisi in October 2025. The same logic governs Tunisia, where over €1.1 billion in EU funding has flowed since President Saïed dismantled the constitution by decree.

And it is not only the Mediterranean Association Agreements. Europe remains the largest donor to the Palestinian Authority, with €1.6 billion pledged for 2025-2027. The Commission has now admitted that the pay-for-slay scheme it once suspended payments over continues to operate through rebranded channels. The leverage exists. But it is being applied in only one direction.

In twenty-five years, the EU has never formally invoked Article 2 against any of its seven Mediterranean partners. Israel would be the first of the EU’s current Mediterranean partners to face such a procedure. The only democracy in the group. The state whose people were subjected to, as President Macron put it, “the biggest antisemitic massacre of our century”, and whose territory has been the target of sustained rocket and missile attack throughout the life of the agreement. Call this what it is. It is not the enforcement of a rule. It is a political decision wearing legal clothing.

There is also the question of where Europe thinks the region is going. The Abraham Accords have survived Gaza. A US-brokered ceasefire took hold in October, negotiated with Qatari and Egyptian mediation. On April 14 and again on April 23, Lebanese and Israeli diplomats sat across from each other in Washington for the first high-level direct meetings since 1993.

Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco have kept their relationships with Israel intact through the war. Saudi Arabia has not formally normalised, but has not withdrawn from Iran-focused security cooperation either. The Arab states with the most direct stake in Israel’s conduct, and the populations with the most direct grievance over Gaza, have not severed institutional ties. They have kept them.

If the suspension goes through, Europe will have done something no Arab state has done. It will have severed the legal architecture of its relationship with Israel while governments in Cairo, Amman, Abu Dhabi, Manama and Rabat maintain theirs. In a region where Europe has complained for years about being marginalised, the EU will have chosen to marginalise itself further, and to do so unilaterally.

The stakes here are not primarily commercial, though they include commerce. They are strategic. Germany has put €6.5 billion into the Israeli Arrow-3 system, the upper tier of the European Sky Shield initiative that eighteen European countries have joined to protect their own airspace. Horizon Europe embeds Israeli universities — Weizmann, Tel Aviv, the Technion — in more than €1.1 billion of joint research, much of it in fields directly relevant to European security.

Trade is the smallest piece of this: a €10.7 billion European surplus on €42.6 billion in goods, and €800 million to €1.3 billion in annual losses for European exporters if suspension goes through. A Council finding that Israel has breached its human rights obligations does not formally cancel any of these arrangements. It changes every future contract, every future parliamentary authorisation, every future political cover a defence minister needs to buy Israeli. Europe would be voting to corrode the security architecture it has spent a decade building.

The heart of the matter is that the post-war Middle East is being built right now, in rooms Europe is not in. The diplomatic work is American. The financial work is Gulf. The political normalisations are bilateral. Europe has been reduced to statements and cheques, and now proposes to remove itself from one of the last functioning frameworks it still has.

What will be left, after suspension, is a Europe that can complain about the Middle East but cannot shape it.

Simone Rodan-Benzaquen is Senior Envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.