The European Union and the Palestine Question

The Treaty of Rome , signed on 25 March 1957, established the European Economic Community . During the 1950s and 1960s, the main concern for the six original member countries—Germany , France , Belgium , The Netherlands , Luxembourg , and Italy —was not a common foreign policy, but rather further integration, internal trade, and agricultural policies. Economic relations with the countries in the Middle East were therefore somewhat disorganized, and foreign policy was not coordinated within the European Community at the time. The lack of a common foreign policy was clearly demonstrated when the June 1967 War broke out. The war presented what was widely seen in Europe at the time to be a golden opportunity for the European Community to unite its foreign policy in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Many European politicians from all political factions simultaneously saw an equally golden opportunity for the European Community to contribute to resolving the Palestine question because of the community’s history as a peace project. The European self-perceived “moral right to preach” to others what to do was thus born, and the Palestine question became a test case for the community’s emerging foreign policy during the 1970s, especially after the 1973 war . It was a test that the European Community passed. The community managed to speak with a common voice on the question of Palestine and started progressively to develop its vision of a just peace in the conflict. Hundreds of declarations followed over the decades. Many of them were visionary and ahead of their time. Other actors involved in the conflict, most notably the United States and Israel, often followed later on and adopted policies that the community had earlier outlined.

Policy toward the Palestine Question during the 1970s

Beginning in 1971, in its first official statement regarding the question of Palestine, the Foreign Ministers of the European Community called for a just peace in the Middle East without even mentioning the Palestinians as an explicit party to the conflict. Also in 1971, the European Community started to fund the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Two years later, in the wake of the October 1973 war and the subsequent Arab oil embargo, the foreign ministers repeated their call for a just peace in the region, but now stressed that “in the establishment of a just and lasting peace account must be taken of the legitimate rights of the Palestinians.

In 1977, the European Community issued a new statement that again called for just peace, taking “into account the need for a homeland for the Palestinian people,” and it opposed Israeli settlements for the first time. Two years later, in 1979, the Foreign Ministers of the European Community declared that the Israeli government’s policy of establishing settlements in the occupied territories was a violation of international law. It is ironic that terms like “colonialization” and annexation were sometimes used by top European Community officials to describe Israel’s settlement policy in the occupied Palestinian territories during the 1980s and early 1990s when the settlements were only a fraction of today’s 500,000 settlers in the West Bank and 200,000 in East Jerusalem .

What was widely seen as a pro-Palestinian turn in the community’s declaration on the question of Palestine during the 1970s came about for several reasons: (a) The question of Palestine was seen as a major security threat to Europe; (b) The European Community was highly dependent on oil from the Middle East; and (c) The high oil prices led to massive transfers of wealth from the industrialized world to the oil producers in the Middle East, which in turn led to massive increases in trade, thereby creating another strategic objective. 

The European Community’s most important statement regarding the question of Palestine, the seminal Venice Declaration of 13 June 1980, used the term “just solution” instead of just peace, and it called for Palestinian self-determination and for the PLO to be included in the negotiations. This was widely seen as innovative in the international community, and both Israel and the United States were highly critical of the European Community at the time. The Arab countries and the PLO reacted to the Venice Declaration differently. The PLO was clearly disappointed about the Venice Declaration. It had hoped that the declaration would include a proposal to replace the word “refugees” with the word “Palestinians” in UN Security Council Resolution 242 . This did not happen, and the PLO was not recognized as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinians, another key Palestinian demand.

Active European Community Financial Assistance to the Occupied Territories during the 1980s

During the 1980s, the European Community became more active in the occupied territories. By the mid-1980s the local situation for the Palestinians living under Israeli military was given much more attention in the European Community’s declarations. In 1984, the Foreign Ministers declared “their wish to develop the activity of the European Community on behalf of the populations of the occupied territories.” Two years later, the Council adopted a proposal from the commission to help the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip . These new measures involved financial assistance and trade arrangements. Throughout the decade, the European Community legitimized in several important declarations what were to become the two leading principles of the Oslo peace process: “mutual recognition” and “land for peace.” When the Declaration of Principles (DOP) was finally signed on 13 September 1993, thirteen years after the Venice Declaration was issued, it looked much closer to the Venice Declaration than anything the United States or the Israelis had previously outlined. This suggested that the European Community’s declarations reflected both a clear path-dependency and normative power.

Support for the Peace Process but Opposition to Palestinian Statehood

After the 1993 Declaration of Principles was signed, what had by then become the European Union (EU) quickly emerged as the biggest supporter of the peace process. During the 1990s, the EU contributed around 50 percent of the total aid to the Palestinians. Among many other things, the EU helped set up the Palestinian Authority as part of the 1994 agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho area, also known as the Cairo Agreement . At this time in the mid-1990s, the EU’s work on the ground in the Palestinian territories was focused on building up Palestinian institutions for self-rule. It was not until the Berlin Declaration of 1999 that the EU was finally ready to declare its explicit commitment to the idea of a Palestinian state. Shortly after that, in 2000, the Second Intifada erupted, which shifted EU support to emergency assistance. After the Second Intifada ended in 2004, the EU’s focus shifted back to rebuilding and developing Palestinian institutions in preparation for future statehood. But many obstacles were still in place, from the continued Israeli occupation to the intra-Palestinian split between Hamas and Fatah since 2006. During this time, the EU was often criticized for being more of a payer than a real player regarding the question of Palestine since its economic and technical instruments were not powerful enough to push Israel to roll back its occupation. The EU gained ten new member states from the former Eastern bloc in 2004, which made the EU a much less united actor where Palestine was concerned. Later, the rise of right-wing populism in Europe had the same effect.

While the EU and its Member States often played significant roles before and after agreements were signed, they had only marginal roles during the most important peace negotiations over the past five decades: the 1978 Camp David Accords , the 1979 Israel-Egypt Treaty , the 1993 Declaration of Principles, the 1994 Israel-Jordan Treaty , the 1995 Oslo II Accords, the 2000 Camp David Summit , the 2003 Road Map for Peace, and the 2007 Annapolis Conference . The same pattern repeated itself throughout the Obama and Trump presidencies.

High hopes were placed on Salam Fayyad who was appointed prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in 2007. His plan for a Palestinian state to be completed by 2011 elicited enormous excitement in the EU. By 2011, all the involved international institutions (EU, UN , International Monetary Fund , International Bank for Reconstruction and Development ), with the notable exception of the US government, published reports that unanimously stated that the Palestinians were ready for statehood. But the paradoxical reality was that, as the Palestinian Authority progressed toward statehood, from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s, the EU and its Member States became less and less ready to recognize a Palestinian state. When President Abbas submitted the Palestinian bid for UN membership at the Security Council in September 2011, most EU Member States were hesitant and did not openly declare their positions on the Palestinian bid; of the few that actually did, most seemed, in fact, to be against the Palestinians. A year later, in 2012, the Palestinians went back to the UN, this time to the UN General Assembly and sought non-member observer status. This meant that the twenty-seven Member States had to declare their positions: fourteen Member States voted in favor, twelve abstained, and only the Czech Republic opposed the bid.

In July 2013, the EU Commission issued new guidelines against the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights . The new guidelines prohibited grants, prizes, or funding from the EU to the settlements in these territories. Most significantly, the guidelines included a clause stipulating that the occupied territories were not part of the State of Israel. This idea of excluding settlement-linked entities and activities from bilateral relations with Israel became known as the differentiation strategy. Like so many previous EU strategies regarding the question of Palestine, the strategy resulted in much excitement and debate but changed little on the ground in the occupied territories. A similar dynamic was at play when Sweden recognized Palestine the following year in 2014. Several other EU Member States promised to follow, but in fact no one did.

Withdrawal from Involvement Amidst Internal Stresses

Several development in the latter half of the 2010s—the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria , the refugee crisis, the election of Donald Trump, the rise of right-wing populists and nationalists in Europe, and Brexit —significantly weakened the EU’s actor capacity. Big nation-states like the United States and China may survive and perhaps even flourish under conditions of aggressive nationalism, closure, and protectionism, but the EU, whose very existence is premised on the polar opposite principles of cosmopolitanism, openness, and multilateralism, could not.

After 2016 the divisions in the EU regarding the question of Palestine were laid bare for all to see. Even in Western European states like Sweden, the rise of right-wing nationalists meant weakened support for Palestine and increased support for Israel. The EU nevertheless tried to uphold what was referred to by a European diplomat as “the sacred flame of the two-state solution.” In all likelihood, the EU differentiation strategy, together with Sweden's recognition of Palestine in 2014 and the 2016 UN Security Council resolution 2334, were probably the last international efforts to save the two-state solution in the form that the EU imagines it. (The resolution was strongly supported by the three EU Member States in the UN Security Council at the time: France, United Kingdom and Spain .)

As the EU had great difficulties of even agreeing to any kind of policies on the question of Palestine after 2016, its normative power was also significantly weakened. This meant that the EU—which for decades had led the international community’s policy departures on the question of Palestine—had little to nothing to say about the debates that dominate the question of Palestine in the 2020s: equal rights for all in Israel-Palestine, a possible one-state solution, and the questions of apartheid and settler colonialism.