Resuming the EU-Israel Council
It has been in hibernation for a decade. The last EU-Israel Association Council meeting was held in 2012 and, although many EU member states have separately maintained and even increased cooperative relations with Israel, the fact is that they had been put on the back burner as a Union.
It is no secret that the main reason for the estrangement has been the stagnation, or rather the entrenchment and deterioration of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, aggravated both by the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the increasingly precarious situation of the Palestinian population in those occupied territories.
Recent moves in the Middle East, implemented with the Abraham Accords, as well as the visit of US President Joe Biden, seem to have prompted the Europeans to propose to Israel to resume the meetings of the Council, which before entering this decade-long pause statutorily met once a year.
The head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, who unveiled the initiative after it was agreed at the last meeting of EU-27 foreign ministers in Brussels, has proposed that the resumption of the Council should not wait until Israel has a new government that emerges from the elections scheduled for November. The complicated complexity of the Knesset means that the essential negotiations to put together a coalition could drag on for many months, which does not guarantee that the final result will lead to a strong government with full guarantees of fulfilling the legislature, as is the case with the current one, without going any further.
Borrell, who took advantage of the announcement to reaffirm that the EU has not changed its traditional position on a solution to the Palestinian problem that involves the creation and recognition of two states, also said that "the EU-Israel Council will be a good opportunity to rethink the Middle East peace process".
The current head of the Israeli government in office, Yair Lapid, met with his European colleagues in Brussels just over a year ago. Commission President Ursula von der Leyen visited Israel last June. At both meetings, the need to resume the work of the Council and give new impetus to what it was created for was already outlined: to deepen cooperation and the implementation of joint projects in the areas of trade, science, technology, security, culture and education. This intense programme of relations has not ceased, as it has continued to develop through Israel's bilateral relations with EU member countries.
To this, the European Commission, as well as the current rotating EU presidency held by the Czech Republic, want to add the crucial chapter of energy cooperation. Israel is already working flat out to acquire sufficient capacity to extract and export gas resources from its territorial waters to Europe, and thus partially fill the supply gap from Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.