EU Differentiation and Israeli settlements

The EU needs to act faster and further in ensuring that Israeli settlements in no way benefit from EU-Israel bilateral relations according to this report by ECFR in July 2015.

The paper argues that differentiating between Israel and settlement activities within the EU’s bilateral relations is one of most powerful tools at the EU’s disposal for challenging the incentive structure that underpins Israeli support for the status quo. But the European Union must do more to own - and deepen - its use of the language of differentiation to explain its legal responsibilities to distinguish between activities in the Occupied Territories and Israel but also to push back against Israeli attempts to conflate differentiation with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Following the July 2015 Foreign Affairs Council conclusions, the report also argues that a policy of differentiation must be more coherently implemented across the EU and calls for the Commission to task its directorates general with reviewing their existing interactions with Israel to assess whether differentiate between Israel proper and the settlements. It also calls for a more coherent use of business advisories across Europe of the potential legal and financial consequences of doing business with Israeli entities in the Occupied Territories.

The authors raise the possibility of extending a differentiation policy to new areas, currently largely untouched by the EU’s de facto differentiation efforts, including: the integration of the European and Israeli financial sectors, the charitable status within the EU of organisations that support Israel’s settlement enterprise and the validity within the EU of legal documents issued by Israeli authorities in the Occupied Territories.

ESO: Background information: How to Revive EU Policy on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict http://www.europeansources.info/record/how-to-revive-eu-policy-on-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/

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