Settlement sanctions are a start. Ending EU complicity is key

The UK and eleven other countries issued a joint statement expressing their intention to sanction Israel’s expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank. But before we celebrate too loudly, it's worth asking what this statement actually changes on the ground and what it conveniently leaves out.

After decades of near‑total Western silence, accompanied by political, economic, and military support that enabled settlement expansion, a joint statement from 12 European and Western governments is significant. It recognises years of public pressure, institutional mobilisation, and BDS work. But “overdue” is the operative word here.

For years, the international community watched settlements metastasise across the West Bank while issuing calls for “restraint” or expressing “concern.”

Between 2023 and 2025, the Israeli government advanced plans for 50,785 new settlement housing units, according to Peace Now. In 2025 alone, the Higher Planning Council approved 27,941 units, the highest annual figure on record.

By the end of April 2026, Israeli settlers had established 363 outposts in the occupied West Bank; more than 58% were created under the 37th government. This construction surge has coincided with widespread Palestinian home demolitions and severe restrictions on Palestinian building

The value of intentions?

The governments’ statement confirms only an “intention” to introduce national measures and/or back European trade restrictions on goods. However, intention is not action; it means whatever follows will also not be immediate.

Bulldozers do not wait for diplomatic intentions to be enforced on the ground. Each day of deliberation buys another month for outposts to become settlements, and for settlements to become permanent facts on the ground, at the expense of Palestinian land and lives.

Belgium, Ireland, and a handful of other states have passed national measures restricting trade with the settlements. That sounds like progress, but it isn't.

Take Ireland's Occupied Territories Bill. It bans goods from Israeli settlements, but says nothing about services. Belgium's ban follows the same pattern: it restricts goods, not services, and leaves exports entirely alone.

Compare that to what the law actually requires. The ICJ's July 2024 advisory opinion is clear: all trade in settlement goods and services - every import, every export - must end. Not be curtailed. Not be managed. Not be rebranded. The settlements themselves must be dismantled, and their inhabitants evacuated, not administered more gently.

What’s really illegal

Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention exists for one reason: to stop an occupying power from re-engineering the demographics of the territory it occupies. Israel's presence in the territories under its control has violated that principle for decades.

The throughline is visible across over 78 years. The 1948 Nakba, which displaced more than 700,000 Palestinians; the 1976 Naksa that displaced over 300.000 Palestinians, the ongoing expansion of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem; the 1981 annexation of the Golan Heights; the continued military presence in southern Lebanon; and now the genocide in Gaza, which has killed over 73,000 Palestinians, brought roughly 70% of the territory under Israeli military control, and displaced more than 1.9 million people.

These are not isolated violations. They reflect a consistent pattern grounded in a logic of elimination and a sustained effort to replace an indigenous population, not merely to govern or extract from it.

This isn't a matter of opinion. It's the same legal framework that Western governments themselves created, just applied selectively when convenient.

If international law is the standard, it must apply consistently. Not only to the violations that are politically easy to name, and not only where naming them carries no economic cost.

Most of the diplomatic energy poured into this issue goes toward preserving the viability of a two-state solution. But that's not the international community's call to make. Its actual obligation is to end complicity in the occupation and let the occupied population in Palestine determine its own political future, on its own terms.

Outsiders don't get to design the outcome. They must stop standing in its way by ending their complicity, and respect colonised people’s right to self-determination.

An infrastructure of complicity

Settlements are often discussed as though they're the work of a rogue fringe acting outside state policy, but this is evidently not the case. Settlers operate with the economic, financial, and military backing of the Israeli state.

Framing settlement expansion as a private, grassroots phenomenon rather than a matter of state policy is itself a political strategy. A settler-colonial project cannot run on individual initiative alone; it depends on infrastructure, funding, and armed protection.

In 2023, the Israeli government allocated $1.1 billion to the Ministry of Transport to upgrade and develop roads that settlers use in the West Bank. In December 2025, the government approved the plan to strengthen and develop settlements and related infrastructure, with a budget of around $919 million.

The government has also directly funded and equipped unauthorised outposts. In 2023, it provided roughly $8 million to 68 settler herding outposts and 33 additional outposts.

In response to the governments’ statement, the EU foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, welcomed the step and highlighted the EU's role as the largest humanitarian donor to Gaza and the West Bank, a territory now increasingly referred to, diplomatically, as "the State of Palestine".

That funding is real, but it doesn't cancel out complicity. The EU remains Israel's largest trading partner, a relationship underwritten by the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

Several European states, including the UK and Belgium, continue to host arms manufacturing tied to Israel's military industry. And dual EU-Israeli citizens who are members of the Israeli army implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity can travel in and out of the EU freely, facing no consequences there.

None of this is a radical demand from Palestinians and the solidarity movement in Europe. The European Citizens' Initiative Justice for Palestine, signed by over a million Europeans, calls on the European Commission and member states to invoke Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement — the clause that makes the relationship conditional on respect for human rights and democratic values.

The clause already exists. The violations are already documented, including by the EU's own investigations. What's missing is enforcement of EU and international law.

Settlement sanctions cannot be allowed to serve as a symbolic gesture that condemns the settlements while leaving intact the very agreement that enables business as usual, including continued political cooperation, trade, energy links, and research partnerships.

As world leaders continue to force us to watch a genocide unfold before our eyes, it matters that we acknowledge and celebrate victories. But those victories also remind us that organised, strategic work can't be let off the hook just because its influence looks small or slow to arrive.

These bans didn't happen on their own; they happened because people organised, showed up, and refused to let their governments look away. Even when they were exhausted, worn down, and felt like nothing was moving, they have kept going.

Tamam Abusalama is a Palestinian-Belgian communications professional, born and raised in the Jabalia Refugee Camp. She is currently leading the strategy for the European Citizens’ Initiative Justice for Palestine, which calls for the full suspension of the EU-Israel Association Agreement.

Follow her on Twitter/X: @TamamBeitJirja

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.