Europe's Cheap Absolution

Oct 17, 2026 · @Hannan Lis

Europe is not sanctioning Israel because of what Israel does. It is sanctioning Israel because of what Europe did.

In May, EU foreign ministers agreed unanimously to sanction Israeli settlers in the West Bank, the first punitive measure the bloc has managed to pass since the Gaza war began. In September, Britain led a further round, and the Netherlands went further than anyone: a unilateral ban on every product from the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan, enforced with bag searches of Israeli passengers at Schiphol and prison terms of up to six years. Spain, Belgium, Ireland, Malta and Slovenia are pressing to suspend the EU-Israel Association Agreement outright. Italy has already cut defense ties.

Look at who leads and who holds back. The ex-colonial powers push. Germany brakes. That is not a coincidence. It is the whole story.

A state born at the wrong moment

Israel was founded in 1948, the year Europe began retreating from Asia and Africa. Its path to statehood ran through European paperwork: Sykes-Picot, the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate. To the newly independent world, it looked like Europe's last implant rather than a people coming home.

The Non-Aligned Movement, Algeria's FLN, the ANC and Hanoi adopted the PLO as a sister liberation struggle. The 1975 UN resolution branding Zionism as racism was the diplomatic fruit of that alliance. The apartheid analogy grew straight out of it.

The Jews had just survived the greatest crime Europe ever committed. Within a generation they were recast as Europe's agents.

The academy made it a theory

Western universities then gave the slogan a syllabus. Edward Said's Orientalism in 1978, and the "settler-colonial studies" that followed, produced a theory in which Israel is illegitimate by category, not by conduct. Nothing Israel does can redeem it, because the sin is existing.

Once that frame sets, facts stop mattering. Every Israeli action confirms the thesis. Every Palestinian action, including the massacre of October 7, becomes resistance. A generation of European diplomats, journalists and ministers was educated inside that frame. They did not adopt it. They inherited it.

Why governments act: guilt, votes and vocabulary

Guilt. Britain, France, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands spent decades apologizing for empire. The Dutch king apologized for slavery in 2023 and for the Indonesian war in 2022; three years later The Hague is searching luggage for settlement olives. Sanctioning Israel lets them switch sides in their own story and become the anti-colonial conscience of the world. It costs nothing. No reparations, no borders redrawn, no uncomfortable museum exhibits. Just a Jewish state to censure. Germany, whose guilt is the Holocaust rather than empire, is the one major power still applying the brakes. The map of European sanctions is a map of who feels guilty about what.

Votes. The same empires imported large Muslim populations from their former colonies. In Britain, France, Belgium, Spain and the Netherlands, hostility to Israel is now a domestic constituency, not a foreign-policy position. The colonial frame lets a minister serve that constituency in the language of human rights rather than the language of communal politics. Everyone in the room knows what is being done. The frame means nobody has to say it.

Vocabulary. Once Israel is filed under settler colonialism, sanctions stop being a choice and become a duty. This is the logic Europe applied to Rhodesia and South Africa, and it explains the sequence we are watching. Settlers were the first target the bloc could agree on because settlers fit the story. Hamas does not. So Hamas leaders were added to the same package as a fig leaf, and the real energy went where the theory pointed.

What the frame has to erase

The settler-colonial story only works if you delete most of Jewish history.

It has to erase three thousand years of Jewish presence in the land and a people whose prayers faced Jerusalem from every exile. It has to erase 1948 itself, when Jews fought and expelled the British Empire, the only people in the region to throw a European power out by force. And it has to erase roughly half of Israel's Jews: the descendants of nearly a million refugees driven out of Baghdad, Cairo, Sana'a, Tripoli and Tehran. Colonists have a metropole to return to. These Jews have nothing behind them but the countries that expelled them.

A theory that must erase half the population to describe the country is not analysis. It is projection. Europe looks at Israel and sees its own past, and punishes what it sees.

The bill comes due elsewhere

Europe's defenders will say the measures are narrow, lawful and aimed at specific conduct in the West Bank, not at Israel's existence. Take that at face value and the question still stands: why does a continent that cannot agree on Iran, on Russia's frozen assets, or on its own borders find unanimity only when the target is Jews building houses in Judea?

The answer is that the frame does the work the facts cannot. Colonial guilt needs a confession, and Israel is the cheapest one on offer.

The Jewish state will survive European sanctions. It survived European empires. What Europe will not survive is the habit of mind this reveals: a continent so desperate to be forgiven for its past that it will convict the one people it wronged most, so long as the verdict comes in the language of justice.