EU ministers fail to reach deal on sanctions targeting Judea-Samaria towns, Sa’ar says

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar said on Monday that European Union foreign ministers failed to reach agreement on sanctions targeting Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria during a meeting in Brussels.

“There was no consensus. There was no qualified majority. In fact, there was no majority at all,” Sa’ar tweeted.

However, Jerusalem’s top diplomat said, E.U. High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas “has chosen to continue her obsessive campaign against Israel, referring the matter to the Committee of Permanent Representatives (COREPER), in an attempt to keep the campaign alive, and find a new way to circumvent the rules.”

“Israel’s relations with Europe should be based on dialogue and fairness. Tricks like this do nothing to advance our shared interests,” he added, referring to the possible E.U. ban on imports of goods produced in Israeli communities in what the European Union calls the “West Bank.”

“Everybody agrees that the situation in the West Bank is really intolerable,” Kallas told reporters at the start of the meeting, AFP reported. “There have been a lot of asks and requests from the member states regarding the ban of the trade with illegal settlements,” Kallas said. “Let’s see if these options that have been provided now will have a stronger push from member states.”

The European Commission, the E.U.’s executive arm, last week circulated a paper outlining three options to restrict trade with Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, Euronews reported.

The council’s legal service told member states that the measures could be adopted as a trade instrument, requiring the support of at least 15 countries representing 65% of the E.U.’s population under qualified majority voting, rather than the unanimity required for foreign-policy decisions.

Twenty of the E.U.’s 27 member states, led by France and Sweden, had urged the commission to draw up proposals for trade restrictions, according to Euronews.

Last month, Israel cut ties with Kallas’s office after she reportedly likened Jerusalem’s policies in Judea and Samaria to the treatment of Black South Africans under the apartheid regime.

Kallas “has for some time now been acting obsessively and with blatant unfairness toward the State of Israel,” Sa’ar said at the time.

“Therefore, as the foreign minister of the State of Israel, I have no choice but to sever all contact with Ms. Kallas until she retracts the blood libel she directed at the world’s only Jewish state, which is also the only democracy in the Middle East,” he added.