A complete trade embargo with Israel is now needed
Palestinians struggle to get food and humanitarian aid near Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on Monday. In recent weeks more and more respected historians and intellectuals have called what is happening in Gaza a genocide. Photo: AP/Mariam Dagga
The only appropriate response to Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians should be a complete trade embargo.
Ireland has garnered widespread praise globally for the solidarity it has shown Palestine, as the brutal Israeli assault on Gaza continues. From joining the case against Israel at the International Court of Justice to recognizing the state of Palestine, Ireland is widely credited with being the European country most supportive of the Palestinian cause.
At EU level, however, the bar has been set very low: the callous indifference of most EU states to the carnage in Gaza over the last 33 months makes Ireland an outlier in Brussels. Back in February 2024, along with Spain, Ireland asked the European Commission to undertake an "urgent review” of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
That review has gone virtually nowhere because there is zero political will to do anything to confront Israel in Brussels and most EU capitals. And although recent EU rhetoric towards Israel has hardened, no material sanction of any substance appears on the horizon.
The EU is Israel’s largest trade partner, accounting for almost 30% of its trade in goods in 2024. By contrast, Israel is only the 31st largest trade partner of the EU, representing 0.8% of total EU goods trade.
By any measure, this is an extraordinarily asymmetric trading relationship. The EU is by far the stronger partner, and yet it has been completely unwilling to use that muscular trade leverage to change Israel’s behaviour, even when that behaviour has been utterly at odds with Israel’s commitments under the EU-Israel Association Agreement (not to mention the EU’s own democratic norms.)
At home, the Occupied Territories Bill is still making its way through the Oireachtas. Tabled originally in 2018 by independent senator, Frances Black, the bill would ban trade with the illegal settlements in the West Bank.
The Occupied Territories Bill was given significant ballast by the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion, which declared that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land was unlawful. Despite this, the Irish government failed to pass the bill before the dissolution of the Oireachtas prior to last year’s general election.
Nine months on, and despite immeasurably greater loss of life among Palestinian civilians as they are starved and murdered in the bacchanalian concentration camp the Israelis have turned Gaza into, the bill is still stuck in the Oireachtas.
Government representatives repeatedly cite “legal advice” when asked why the bill has been continually delayed. This seems to be based on the view that the passage of the bill would be contrary to EU law. This contention deserves more serious scrutiny.
Within the EU, trade is a supranational competence, where the European Commission acts on behalf of the EU in international fora. That would seem to rule out member states "doing a solo run" on international trade.
In fact, there is every reason for Ireland doing a "solo run" and acting with conviction by putting in place a full trade embargo against Israel.
This would constitute an unusual move in the EU trade field. But it is fully justified with reference to Israel’s repeated and serious violations of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.
This association agreement has been in place now for almost a quarter century. It is the main treaty governing the EU’s relationship with Israel. The key element of the agreement is Article 2.
It says: “Relations between the Parties, as well as all the provisions of the Agreement itself, shall be based on human rights and democratic principles, which guides their internal and international policy and constitutes an essential element of this agreement.”
There is no reading of Article 2 that does not deem Israel in gross violation of its commitments under the agreement.
Further, the advisory opinion published by the International Court of Justice in July 2024 emphasizes that states are under “an obligation to take steps to prevent trade or investment relations that assist in the maintenance of the illegal situation created by Israel” in the Palestinian territories.
In recent weeks more and more respected historians and intellectuals have called what is happening in Gaza a genocide. These include Professor Omar Bartov of Brown University, one of the most reputable Jewish scholars of the Holocaust, and David Grossman, Israel’s most feted novelist of the modern era.
So what should Ireland do, now that Israel is unequivocally considered to be carrying out a genocide against the Palestinian population of Gaza? In my view there is a clear cut case for going beyond the Occupied Territories Bill and proceeding with a complete trade embargo on Israel.
To those who say “this will inevitably precipitate an EU response”, I say, so what? This is a completely normal part of the European Integration process.
Ireland, for example, has been a "laggard" in implementing collectively agreed EU environmental measures for decades. During that time it has been brought to the Court of Justice by the European Commission on many occasions.
In this case, what would happen is as follows: the European Commission would deem Ireland’s unilateral action to be in violation of its treaty obligations. In response, Ireland would say “No, we reject such an assertion and we insist on testing this before the Court of Justice”.
What would happen then? Well, any case to go before the court would zoom in quite forensically on Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement, and Ireland would emphasise that because Israel is in such egregious violation of that agreement, the unilateral imposition of a trade embargo was not just justified but entirely necessary.
The significance of such an Irish move is that, for the first time within the EU, we would see a judicial interpretation of the meaning of Article 2 of the Association Agreement. Amongst the key questions at issue would be: is the language of Article 2 on human rights merely aspirational or does it imply binding commitments by the signatories?
Israel’s reaction to all of this will no doubt be hysterical and fall back on a familiar posture of performative victimhood: "We are history’s eternal victims and we remain victims, despite becoming perpetrators of exactly the dreadful things done to us in the past".
If Ireland really wanted to make a difference, and help end the genocidal Israeli onslaught on Palestinians, it should enact a comprehensive trade embargo on Israel and dare the EU authorities to institute legal action.
At the very least we need to see the meaning and substance of Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement tested before the Court of Justice of the European Union. The appalling suffering of the people of Gaza makes this a truly urgent task.
- John O’ Brennan is Professor of European Politics at Maynooth University. He is the founding director of the Maynooth Centre for European and Eurasian Studies
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