European Commission urges embargoing free trade with Israel.

Sept 2025 : The EU executive has called for a suspension of free trade with Israel and sanctions on two far-right Israeli ministers in response to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

Ursula von der Leyen had already floated the proposal to suspend the trade parts of the EU-Israel association agreement last week as the European Commission faced intense pressure for greater action amid criticism that it was not using its economic leverage to influence the Israeli government. There is, however, no certain majority from EU member states for the proposals outlined on Wednesday since, Germany, one of Israel’s key allies, has long been reluctant to take such steps.

The proposals include suspending Israel’s preferential access to the European market by reimposing tariffs on some goods, and freezing mutual benefits related to bidding for public contracts and the protection of intellectual property rights. The commission also called for sanctions on Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, violent Israeli settlers in the West Bank and 10 Hamas leaders. The plans were presented as Israeli forces pressed ahead with their offensive in Gaza City, deepening a conflict that has killed nearly 65,000 Palestinians since Hamas attacked Israel on 7^th. October 2023, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages.

The EU trade commissioner, Maroš Šefčovič, said the proposal meant goods from Israel would be charged at duties equivalent to countries with no free-trade agreement with the bloc. “We regret having to take this step. However, we believe it is both appropriate and proportionate given the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Gaza”, he said. Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, wrote on X that the European proposals were “morally and politically distorted, and it is to be hoped that they will not be adopted, as has been the case so far”.

The commission has been unable to secure the necessary majority for more modest plans to suspend EU research grants to Israeli organisations. The EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, suggested on Wednesday that the same divisions remained. “Although we see that the public opinion in member states is really shifting because of the suffering in Gaza on a political level. I think the political lines are very much in the place where they have been so far”, she said.

For the preferential trade or research grants suspensions to pass, Germany or Italy would have to lend their support. Both measures depend on finding a weighted majority of 15 out of 27 member states representing at least 65% of the EU’s population. When asked about the trade proposals, a German government spokesperson said Berlin had “not yet formed a final opinion on them”.

The sanctions against the Israeli ministers and Hamas leaders require unanimity. Hungary has previously blocked some EU sanctions against Israeli settlers. The commission had shied away from targeting Ben-Gvir and Smotrich in anticipation of a veto from Budapest, a close ally of Benjamin Netanyahu’s nationalist government. The EU is Israel’s largest trading partner, accounting for 32% of Israel’s worldwide trade in goods. The EU-Israel association agreement, formalised in 2000, underpins the €68bn (£59bn) trading relationship and increases cooperation in research, environment and energy. The reimposition of tariffs would affect €5.8bn of Israel’s exports, resulting in about €227m in duties.

Kallas suggested she did not support attempts to exclude Israel from Eurovision, after Spain became the latest country to say it would boycott the Eurovision song contest if Israel took part. Asked about the issue, she said EU measures were intended to put pressure on the Israeli government to change course on Gaza, not to punish Israel or the Israeli people. “All these steps that go to the direction of punishing Israeli people, I think are wrong and we are not really proposing them”, she said.

SANCTION OF TWO FAR RIGHT ISRAELI MINISTER –

Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the two far right Israeli firebrand leaders are facing sanctions from the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Norway, are critical to the political survival of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

In 2022 Benjamin Netanyahu had formed the most rightwing government in Israel’s history, brokering a coalition with Bezalel Smotrich, whose Religious Zionism party has 14 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, whose Jewish Power party has 06 seats. They account for just 20 of his coalition’s 67 seats in parliament but carry outsize influence because if they quit, which both have repeatedly threatened to do, the government will fall. Netanyahu is currently on trial for corruption and fending off calls for an official inquiry into the 7 October 2023 attacks, and keen to avoid early elections.

Bezalel Smotrich, finance minister: Smotrich is a messianic settler who was born in the occupied Golan Heights in 1980, now lives in the occupied West Bank and has repeatedly called for Israeli settlers to return to Gaza.

He believes Jews have a divine right to all land that made up biblical Israel. A commitment to expanding the area controlled by Jewish Israelis – both in de facto terms and through legal annexation – runs through his personal and political life.

In 2005, he was arrested by the Shin Bet security services and questioned for weeks about his role in protests over Israel’s plans to withdraw from Gaza, allegedly on suspicion of planning to block roads and damage infrastructure to try to block the withdrawal. He was released without charges being brought, set up an influential rightwing NGO focused on control of occupied land and won his first parliamentary seat in 2015.

Smotrich is a self-declared “fascist homophobe” who backed segregated maternity wards separating Jewish and Arab mothers and called for government reprisal attacks on Palestinians. He once organised an anti-gay “Beast Parade” protest against Gay Pride.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, security minister: Ben-Gvir embraced extremism so young that Israel’s domestic security forces barred him from serving in the country’s army as a teenager. In his early 30s he had been convicted of incitement to racism and support for a terrorist organisation. Those convictions did not stop him from becoming a lawyer, and he specialised in representing Jewish Israelis charged with terrorism-related offences.

For years his living room was decorated with a portrait of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, who gunned down 29 Palestinians in a Hebron mosque in 1994. Goldstein, like Ben-Gvir, was an admirer of the extremist rabbi Meir Kahane. Having spent most of his life as a figure on Israel’s political fringe, Ben-Gvir was given the security portfolio when he joined Netanyahu’s government. He now controls the police forces that once arrested him, and the jails where he was once held.

Team Maverick