EU leaders will mouth hollow criticism of West Bank settlers at next week’s summit, while staying mute on Israel’s genocide in Gaza – in sharp contrast to the 2026 Nobel peace prize.
The EU “strongly condemns the continued and growing settler violence against Palestinian civilians and calls for accountability”, they aim to say in a declaration in Brussels on Thursday (15 October), according to a draft seen by EUobserver on Friday.
And they are to warn of “legal, economic, and reputational consequences for [Israeli] businesses participating” in building a settlement in the E1 area of the West Bank, which would destroy the two-state solution by chopping the region in half.
It remains to be seen if Slovenia’s pro-Israeli prime minister, Janez Janša, will sign up, after he ranted on X in August that he would veto this type of thing.
But even if Janša agreed, it would still amount to EU impunity for settlers, as there was no mention of banning settler imports or even blacklisting more settler extremists.
“The EU keeps condemning illegal settlements that it trades with, financing the very occupation and abuses it claims to oppose. How does that make any sense?,” said Claudio Francavilla from Human Rights Watch.
The summit draft also voiced “grave concern over developments in Gaza”, where “protection of civilians must be ensured”, and urged Israel to let in more aid.
Israel has killed some 1,450 people in Gaza since an October 2025 ceasefire.
It has killed over 74,000 Palestinians and displaced 1.8 million people in Gaza since 2023, but the EU leaders’ passive-tense language did not blame Israel for civilian deaths or mention Gaza “accountability”.
And that will put our 27 prime ministers and presidents at odds this Thursday with Europe’s moral compass, international law, and public opinion.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday to Navi Pillay, a South African judge, who chaired a UN commission that found Israel guilty of “genocide” in Gaza and who had worked for the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which indicted Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu for war crimes.
She was “a bigot … propagating blood libels,” he said on X.
Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar said: “[Nazi propaganda chief] Joseph Goebbels is probably applauding in hell.”
And US president Donald Trump joined their Nobel-bashing by imposing sanctions on the ICC.
But three other Nobel laureates, from Colombia, DR Congo, and Liberia were among global VIPs who also wrote to the European Commission on Friday urging trade sanctions on Israel, in a sign of wider revulsion.
And “if the EU was serious about fulfilling its obligations under international law, or indeed in terms of its own stated values and policies, it would go much, much further [in terms of sanctions],” said H. A. Hellyer, from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think-tank in London.
Palestine solidarity marches in Berlin, London, Rome, and Warsaw on Saturday showed that ordinary Europeans wanted our elected politicians to take action.
Some 83 percent of Germans and 88 percent of Italians now disapproved of Netanyahu, said the Pew Research Centre in June.
Blood and rubble
The latest EU summit draft pledged support for Palestinian elections.
“The European Union stands ready to support the electoral process, including by the deployment of an EU Election Observation Mission,” it said.
But EU words were being buried in blood and rubble faster than the summit statements could be updated.
The Palestinian vote would have to be postponed until at least late 2027 due to the “security and economic conditions” created by Israel in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority warned France, also on Friday.
Meanwhile, the EU summit will fall two weeks before Israeli elections on 27 October and the leaders’ empty words might be tactical – so as not to feed meat to far-right Israeli zealots in a rabid atmosphere.
But Europe’s quietism is also due to Germany and Italy’s internal politics and its psychopathological mix of World War 2-guilt, raging far-right populism, and transatlantic realpolitik.
“I don’t think this [the draft EU summit text on the Middle East] is a strategy, so much as a statement of the lowest common denominator in EU foreign policy,” RUSI’s Hellyer said.
And going back to the Nazi slurs against the 2026 Nobel, Israeli author Gideon Levy said in the Haaretz daily on Saturday: “No, Sa’ar … If Goebbels has a reason to applaud, it is upon seeing what has happened to the country that arose from the ashes of the Holocaust.”
“Goebbels is applauding perpetrators of genocide around the world, particularly the one in Gaza,” said Levy.
So long as Berlin and Rome don’t realign their compasses, Europe’s silent blessing for Palestinian erasure will feed Israeli hardliners’ schizoid and delusional sense of self-righteousness.
“As long as Israel is not willing to … admit, at least partially, to its crimes, it will never change,” Levy said.