Association Pussyfooting

Nick King

28 March 2026

In July 2025, after nearly two years of relentless military operations throughout the Gaza Strip - characterised as plausibly genocidal by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) - foreign ministers of the European Union (EU) member states convened in Brussels to decide whether to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement. The previous July, the ICJ had handed down its Advisory Opinion on the policies and practices of Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt).

With that judgment, the Court outlined the erga omnes obligation of other states not to recognise, neither de jure nor de facto, any alterations in the status, structure or demographic composition of territory seized by Israel since 5 June 1967. Thereby a duty in law to distinguish between the oPt and Israel applies, which further extends to states bringing to an end impediments to Palestinians' right to self-determination created by occupation. Neither should states render aid nor assistance "in maintaining the situation created by Israel’s illegal presence" in the oPt. States parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention will have the obligation to ensure compliance by Israel with international humanitarian law contained within the Convention.

The EU-Israel Association Agreement, effective since 2000, set up between the parties a free trade area along with progressive liberalisation of the provision of services, of capital movements and of public procurement. Renouned is its Article 2, declaring "relations between the Parties, as well as all the provisions of the Agreement itself, shall be based on respect for human rights and democratic principles, which guides their internal and international policy and constitutes an essential element of this Agreement." Violation of the article's provisions enables either party to adopt undefined 'appropriate measures', including suspension of the Agreement.

Historic disgrace

Popular calls for the EU to act on the Agreement's human rights' provision had resounded throughout the decades since its inception as reports of Israel's atrocities committed in the oPt piled up. Multiple options were before the EU ministers meeting in July 2025, whether to fully suspend the Agreement, withdraw joint preferential trade or research initiatives, embargo commerce with colonial settlements in the oPt, restrict visa concessions, sanction individual politicians ... but nothing was decided.

Image: Swaha    

Amnesty International's Secretary General, Agnès Callimard, called out the failure to act "as one of the most disgraceful moments in the EU’s history". Her remarks carry many citizens' dismay and disillusion with the political management of ever-closer union:

The EU’s refusal to suspend its agreement with Israel is a cruel and unlawful betrayal – of the European project and vision, predicated on upholding international law and fighting authoritarian practices, of the EU’s own rules and of the human rights of Palestinians.

The EU’s own review has clearly found that Israel is violating its human rights obligations under the terms of the Association Agreement. Yet, instead of taking measures to stop it and prevent their own complicity, member states chose to maintain a preferential trade deal over respecting their international obligations and saving Palestinian lives.*

More than political cowardice, the implied absolution conveyed by evading application of an 'essential element' of the Agreement, in light of the obligations of the ICJ's Opinion cited above, will amount to tacit complicity in the crimes committed by Israel's occupation of Palestine.

Quagmire of Hypocrisy

Double standards in the EU's administration of trading relations exposed the common external policy as petrified in a quagmire of introspective reaction and hypocrisy. European deputy, Marc Botenga of the Workers Party of Belgium, addressed European leadership in a speech delivered to the Parliament in Brussels on 26 March 2026. It captured a snapshot of how the EU has drastically lost its bearings. The occasion was a plenary session on the death penalty in Iran:

Everyday, Iranian children are recovered dead, or barely alive, from under the rubble of their homes. Everyday, Lebanese and Palestinian children share the same fate. Their lives - their deaths - do not merit a definitive condemnation. And why ? Because the culprits are your friends ... in Tel Aviv, in Washington.

Worse still, the very same day that Israel moves forward with a law to execute - by hanging - hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, you arranged a debate solely on the death penalty in Iran.

What is the reason for this differentiation ? For me, I'm against capital punishment, whether it takes place in Iran, Saudi Arabia or in Israel. But you ! You close your eyes when the butchers are your friends.

And this is systematic: you sanctioned Russia when it attacked Ukraine, but you support the United States when it bombards Iran. You condemn Russia when it occupies Ukraine, yet you support Israel as it occupies Palestine and Lebanon.

You condemn Iran - religious state, women excluded, lacking democracy - but not your allies, Saudi Arabia - religious monarchy, without democracy nor women's rights ...

You condemn Iran and its support for Lebanon's Hezbollah, but do business with the Emirates who arm genocidal militias in Sudan.

You accuse Venezuela of a lack of democracy, but were silent when Qatar abolished elections.

As our allies occupy and annex everything: 'that's OK, it's not serious, it's for our oil, in our interest, calm down ... '

We reproach our enemies for those things which we permit our allies happily to do, tightening a vice, while all pally with Tel Aviv and Washington. This 'two weights-two measures', it is not only a matter of shame, it permits the creation of a world at war and in chaos, in which we do not want to live and we do not want our children to grow up. Today, this Europe is not a force for good, but a criminal accomplice. Enough is enough !

The Common Foreign and Security Policy is set by foreign ministers of member states in the Council of the European Union. Yanis Varoufakis, on founding Diem25 in 2016, predicted that either Europe will democratise within the next decade or disintegrate. He describes Europe today as having degenerated into a "cesspit of warmongering".

Protest opposing nihilistic governance and expansive military adventurism, although widespread, is confronted with repressive kickback from state institutions on vaguely formulated grounds of 'security'. Intrusion and violence in disrupting public assemblies across Germany is well-documented, especially those called in support of Palestinian liberty, where prisoners' rights organisation Samidoun was proscribed in November 2023. In excess of 10,000 criminal prosecutions had been logged by police at the end of last year in relation to Palestine solidarity. A database cataloguing incidences of repression has been set up jointly by Forensic Architecture and the European Legal Support Centre (also for the UK: Index of Repression). One such case involved lawyer and civil servant in the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, Melanie Schweizer, who was summarily dismissed in February 2025 for her social media commentary and political candidacy condemning Israel as a racist and genocidal state.

Every war is a failed policy. And our politicians get paid a lot of money to find political solutions and not drive us into wars. We must hold them accountable.
 Interview with Melanie Schweizer - This German Civil Servant Was Fired for Criticizing Israel; Jacobin (24 March 2025).

Veteran Palestine solidarity activists in France are subjected to perennial harassment from public prosecutors adopting ideologically-driven complaints mostly engineered by pro-Israeli community associations. Listing a few: members of Urgence Palestine (Palestine Emergency), CAPJPO (Co-ordination of Campaigns for a Just Peace in the Near East), CCIPPP (Grassroots International Protection for Palestinian People), UJFP (French Jewish Union for Peace), and the BDS movement (Boycott Divestment Sanctions) variously have had to respond to a range of intimidatory police interventions and criminal allegations simulating 'apology for terrorism'. Pierre Stambul, a long-serving spokesperson for UJFP, would concur with Schweizer's charge of reponsability directed towards ministerial office-holders:

This genocide would be impossible without a triple complicity: that of the leaders in Washington, of course (Biden like for Trump), that of the feudal Gulf states and that of the European Union led by Germany and France.
 Pierre Stambul (UJFP), interview with Sawt Achaab (9 December 2025). ^±

Immediately contemporary to this post being produced an incident was unfolding. Here the activist was held overnight in police custody before being released the following day without charge or further enquiry.

Communiqué for the release of LFI activist
29 March 2026

Yesterday, March 28, France Insoumise activists from Béziers attended the national demonstration at Toulouse for the cessation of the genocide in Palestine.

A member of CRIF [the French Representative Council of Jewish Institutions] launched an unprovoked, aggressive verbal attack against demonstrators. An activist, part of the event-marshalling team, attempted peaceably to keep back the exceptionally antagonistic individual, who, after trying to start an altercation, eventually went away.

At the end of the demonstration, hooded police intercepted the activist and took him away in an unmarked car to the central police station in Toulouse. At the present moment, he is still detained there, with the possibility of being held for an extended 24-hour period.

We insist on his immediate release ! Stop repression of those who demand an end to the genocide in Palestine !

The LFI activists' experience is not unique, but an example of abuse of powers of arrest which may often precede prosecution on pedantic exaggeration of trivial incidents. Its asymmetric misapplication by executive authorities offers evidence of a sinister repressive trend that is actively seeking to limit freedoms of expression and rights to protest.

Grooming culpability

In the UK meanwhile, the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) has published its second annual State of Protest Report, 2025, entitled How Repression Became Routine. It highlights how creeping legislative and policy increments combine to undermine accountability for protest policing. Police forces exercise measures yet to be authorised in law, leaving the accused to fight for remedy through a prosecution process that never should have been initiated (while, as the case may be, suffering protest, circulation and association bannings).

Constabularies have also been found out employing extensive surveillance strategies for which there is questionable investigative justification and from which significant consequences can ensue for the subjects (without any prosecution being involved, such as loss of access to banking facilities).

Increasingly, policing of protest is becoming politicised as a security matter. Dissent is treated as an existential menace, potentially mixing with aggravating 'connections to terrorism', as piecemeal legislation passes in tandem into law for police powers to deal with the putative threats. 'Offenders' may be pulled up for 'reckless' expression of views deemed supportive of designated terrorist organisations without active involvement in their constituent causes.

The concept of a 'state threat', exercisable via proxies, has gained traction with the current Independent Reviewer of Terrorism and [now] State Threat, Jonathon Hall KC, who reviewed tools available under existing terrorism legislation for their adequacy to deal with the novel notion. Where protest identifies a commercial or foreign interest also connected, say, with government procurement or policy, the protest carries possibilities as a 'state threat'.

Netpol identifies the archetypical deflection as follows:

▶ - a depiction of dissent as subversive;
▶ - thereby a threat to government-aligned interests; and
▶ - thereafter requiring intrusive policing to control the constructed threat.

Or, seen as a boon for the security business, how to ride the tide during a genocide.

*  Amnesty International - EU-Israel: Refusal to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement is a 'cruel and unlawful betrayal'; 15 July 2025.

±  "Ce génocide aurait été impossible sans une triple complicité. Celle des dirigeants de Washington bien sûr (Biden comme Trump), celle des États féodaux du Golfe et celle de l’Union Européenne avec en tête l’Allemagne et la France." Rencontre de « Sawt Achaab » avec le militant juif antisioniste et internationaliste Pierre Stambul, 9 December 2025.