Europe’s condemnation of Israel’s settlements and the poverty of international law: When words replace will
A rare joint statement by fourteen countries condemning Israel’s decision to establish nineteen new settlements in the occupied West Bank has briefly punctured the international silence surrounding one of the longest and most systematic violations of international law in modern history. Co-signed by Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Malta, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, the statement acknowledges what Palestinians have known for decades: Israel’s settlement enterprise is illegal, destabilising, and designed to permanently foreclose Palestinian self-determination.
Yet even as the language sharpens, the response remains trapped in ritual. Condemnation without consequence has become the international community’s preferred posture toward Israel — morally expressive, politically inert. Statements are issued, concerns are noted, and violations continue uninterrupted on the ground.
The settlements approved by Israel’s security cabinet, under the stewardship of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, are not isolated bureaucratic decisions. They are the continuation of a deliberate colonial project that violates the Fourth Geneva Convention, multiple UN Security Council resolutions, and the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice. The West Bank is not “disputed territory,” as Israel insists, but occupied land under international law. Transferring an occupying power’s civilian population into occupied territory is explicitly prohibited. No amount of legal sophistry or historical revisionism can erase this.
The joint statement recognises this plainly, warning that such unilateral actions “violate international law” and “risk fuelling instability.” It also acknowledges that settlement expansion threatens the fragile Gaza peace framework and undermines any attempt to move toward a second phase of negotiations. This linkage matters. What happens in the West Bank cannot be sealed off from Gaza, Jerusalem, or the wider regional crisis. Israel’s policy across all Palestinian territories is unified by a single logic: fragmentation, domination, and permanent control. What is striking, however, is the gulf between diagnosis and remedy.
The same governments issuing this statement continue to arm Israel, deepen trade relations, and shield it diplomatically at international forums. Some are complicit not merely through silence but through active support — weapons exports, intelligence cooperation, preferential trade agreements, and repeated obstruction of binding accountability measures at the United Nations.
This contradiction exposes a deeper truth about the current global order. International law is invoked as a moral language but denied as an enforcement mechanism. As the sociologist Jean Ziegler once observed with brutal clarity, “International law exists, but it applies only to the weak.” Nowhere is this more evident than in Palestine, where illegality has endured for over five decades without sanction, transforming law from a binding norm into a hollow aspiration.
The reference in the statement to opposition to annexation, including the E1 settlement project, exposes a long-standing international anxiety: Israel is no longer even pretending to preserve the territorial basis for a Palestinian state. The E1 corridor, if completed, would sever the West Bank into disconnected enclaves, rendering a contiguous Palestinian state geographically impossible. This is not an unintended consequence of settlement growth. It is its central purpose.
For years, Israeli leaders have spoken the language of security while implementing policies of demographic engineering. Smotrich, an unapologetic pro-settler ideologue, has been unusually candid. He does not believe in a Palestinian people, let alone Palestinian sovereignty. Under his political watch, settlement expansion has accelerated, Palestinian land seizures have intensified, and settler violence has surged — often with the protection, complicity, or direct participation of Israeli forces.
Against this reality, the repeated invocation of the “two-state solution” begins to sound less like a viable political horizon and more like a diplomatic incantation. The joint statement reaffirms that there is “no alternative” to a negotiated two-state solution. But reaffirmation is not resurrection. A solution that is systematically dismantled on the ground cannot be sustained by rhetorical consensus alone. One cannot negotiate over land that is being confiscated in real time.
The erosion of international law in Palestine carries consequences far beyond the region. When violations are acknowledged but unpunished, illegality becomes normalised. When occupation persists indefinitely without cost, power replaces principle as the organising logic of global affairs. This selective application of law corrodes the credibility of states that claim to defend a rules-based international order elsewhere.
The contrast is unavoidable. The same governments that invoke international law forcefully in Ukraine or other geopolitical theatres hesitate when Palestinian rights are at stake. This inconsistency is not lost on the Global South, nor on populations increasingly sceptical of Western moral authority. A legal order that protects some civilians while abandoning others is not universal law; it is geopolitical preference dressed in legal language.
The statement’s affirmation of Palestinians’ right to self-determination is welcome, but long overdue. Self-determination cannot coexist with permanent occupation, land confiscation, parallel legal systems, or settler impunity. It requires more than recognition; it demands enforcement. Protection of civilians, meaningful sanctions, accountability through international courts, and an end to diplomatic immunity for systematic violations are not radical demands — they are the minimum obligations of states that claim fidelity to international law.
History offers an instructive parallel. South African apartheid did not collapse because it was condemned in speeches. It collapsed because condemnation evolved into sanctions, isolation, arms embargoes, and sustained global pressure that made the system economically and politically untenable. Israel’s settlement project has endured precisely because it has been insulated from such consequences.
If the fourteen countries are serious — and their words suggest that they understand the stakes — then the next step is unavoidable. Condemnation must be followed by action: suspension of arms transfers linked to settlement activity, trade consequences for annexationist policies, full support for International Criminal Court processes, and an end to shielding Israel from accountability through procedural delay.
Palestinians do not need more statements recognising their rights while their land is carved up settlement by settlement. They need an international community willing to defend the law it so readily proclaims.
Until that happens, every new settlement approved, every annexation advanced, and every Palestinian home demolished will stand as an indictment not only of Israeli policy — but of a world that saw the crime, named it accurately, and chose, once again, to do nothing.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.