The E.U.’s Proposed Sanctions Against Israel: Excessive Reliance on the State Governments

To leverage the combined power, or united front, that is possible in Europe, the European Union was established in the waning years of the twentieth century. Roughly thirty years later, the power of the state governments at the federal level still compromised the leverage, especially in foreign affairs and defense. Even in sanctioning trading partners, even qualified majority voting in the Council of the E.U. can be said to have negatively impacted the ability of the E.U. Commission, the executive branch, to leverage the political muscle of the E.U. against other countries. State-level political agendas could essentially hold any possible leverage hostage. It may be worth thinking about why a qualified majority vote in the Council of the E.U., which represents the state governments, rather than in the E.U.’s parliament, which represents E.U. citizens, was necessary for trade sanctions to be applied to duty-free imports from Israel. That state-level political or economic interests could possibility trump applying economic leverage to stop Israel’s genocide and holocaust in Gaza, as well as Israel’s military attacks on other countries in the Middle East can be an indication that the state governments have too much power at the federal level. For if the E.U. is only an aggregation of states, without the whole being more than the sum of the parts, then the whole sans the aggregate cannot very well enact leverage on foreign actors abroad, even those whose behavior has been nothing short of atrocious.

On September 17, 2025, the European Commission released its proposal to sanction Israel “for its ongoing military assault in Gaza, as well as deepening occupation of the West Bank, which Brussels says breach the EU-Israel Association Agreement.”[1] Regarding that treaty, I contend that the E.U.’s state governments should not have any say on the consequences for Israel because the treaty is between the E.U. and Israel. As trade is an exclusive competency of the E.U., only federal institutions, which include the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Court of Justice, rightly have sufficient jurisdiction (i.e., competence) to terminate the Agreement due to the violation or sanction Israel economically (as the Agreement is economic in nature).

Moreover, developing the habit of distinguishing distinctly federal governmental (i.e., executive, legislative, and judicial) institutions from other E.U. bodies that represent the states would not be a bad idea for the European political elite, many of whom have been in fear of even using the term federal because of what that might provoke in Euroskeptic states such as Hungary. That fear, I submit, is likely overblown, and it subtly undercuts the E.U. itself, especially in it being a whole beyond a mere aggregation of states.

The E.U. Commission, subject to judicial review by the ECJ, determined that Israel had violated the Agreement. The decision to act against Israel was based on “’the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza following the military intervention of Israel, the blockade of humanitarian aid, the intensifying of military operations,’ including the ongoing ground offensive, according to the European Commission.”[2] Such a credible finding against Israel does not justify state governments intervening through their access at the federal level through the European Council or the Council of the E.U. on suspicion that the E.U. president and her commissioners were acting out of prejudice against Israel. This in turn is clear from the fact that the proposed sanctions also apply to ten members of Hamas, in addition to two Israeli ministers, Security Minister Gvir and Finance Minister Smotrich “for their role inciting violence in the West Bank.”[3] The Agreement, of course, only holds for Israel, rather than Hamas, so that the proposed sanctions extend to Hamas demonstrates that the Commission was “bending over backwards” to be fair in such a one-sided war that it is not really a war, but, rather, a genocide and even a holocaust of cruelty wherein death is not deemed as “punishment” enough according to the utterly fallacious theory of collective justice. 

E.U. President Von der Leyen said the week before the announcement of the proposed sanctions, “The horrific events taking place in Gaza on a daily basis must stop. There needs to be an immediate ceasefire, unrestrained access for all humanitarian aid, and the release of all hostages held by Hamas.”[4] She continued, “We propose to suspend trade concessions with Israel, sanction extremist ministers and violent settlers, and put bilateral support to Israel on hold . . .”[5] I submit that it would be difficult for the justices at the ECJ to find bias in her rationale or remedy, or, moreover, with her legitimacy in taking such a decision for the E.U. as a united front even though some state governments were at odds with her decision. 

The whole is more than the sum of the parts, and yet only if one of the two largest states in opposition vote in favor of the sanctions would they pass. The E.U.’s foreign minister, Kaja Kallas, was pessimistic, noting at the time, “The political lines are very much in the place where they have been so far.”[6] But that is at the state level; things might have already changed in the European Parliament, whose representatives not only represent European voters, but also have the interests of the E.U. itself, including its treaties with other countries, in mind. 

That the bias woven into the federal-level fabric of the E.U. in favor of the state governments over E.U. citizens could inhibit the E.U. from taking even an economic stand against a genocidal government indicates that the state governments have too much power at the federal—and it is federal—level of the European Union, such that reform in the Union’s basic or constitutional law is warranted. If such is the case, care should be taken so too much power be taken away from the state governments such that they could not even defend their retained sovereignty from undue encroachment by the feds. Americans could afford to take a lesson on that, for a one-size-fits-all public policy becoming monopolistic at the expense of differences between states, whether American or European, does not bode well in any empire-scale union.  

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1. Shona Murray, “EU Moves to Sanction Israel over Gaza, West Bank Humanitarian Crisis,” Euronews.com, September 17, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.

Nationalism at Eurovision: A Lack of Vision

The inherent retentiveness of conservatism benefits a society because it need not “reinvent the wheel” in “starting from scratch,” as resort can be made to customs that have been efficacious. Unfortunately, conservatism can easily be in denial as to the need for adaptation to changes whether in geopolitical institutions or in culture. The advent of the European Union as a federal system of dual-sovereignty has been easy fodder for conservatism’s proclivity of denial with regard to very new things. Eurovision, too, was an invention beyond even the European Union, and thus also of the post-World-War-II history of integration meant in part as a check on the full-blown nationalism that had twice decimated Europe in the twentieth century. So it is problematic that the EBU, the organization behind the Eurovision Song Contest, has made so many category mistakes involving Europe in favor of nationalism.

The full essay is at "Nationalism at Eurovision."

Exploiting the E.U.’s Vulnerability to Enable an Atrocity Abroad

On April 3, 2025, Viktor Orban, prime minister of the E.U. state of Hungary, ignored not only the arrest warrant on Ben Netanyahu, the sitting prime minister of Israel, but also the E.U. law in the Rome Statute that requires the E.U. states to act on such warrants issued by the ICC (the International Criminal Court) by arresting people wanted by the Court. The provision in the Rome Statute of the E.U. requires all state governments to arrest people who are wanted by the ICC.  Orban doubtless knew that he could exploit union’s vulnerability with impunity because, like the U.S. in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the E.U. relied so much on the state governments to abide by and implement federal law and regulations. By ignoring the Rome Statute, he put the E.U. itself at risk.

To put Orban’s defiance in perspective, Israel’s military had just killed fifty people in Gaza, including children who could not possibly have been culpable in the attack on civilians in Israel on October 7, 2023 even though the president of Israel declared after that attack that every resident in Gaza was guilty and thus deserved to pay the price in suffering and even wholesale death.[1] “At least 27 Palestinians [were] killed in an Israeli air strike on a school in northern Gaza that was serving as a shelter for displaced families,” and the killing of another 97 people in Israeli attacks over the previous 24 hours” occurred as Israel’s “ground offensive was expanding to seize large parts of the Palestinian territory.”[2] These killings of innocent people took place in the context of “Israel’s cutoff of food, fuel, medicine and other supplies to Gaza’s 2 million people” that had been put into effect only months earlier in order to strengthen Israel’s negotiating position.[3] That a commission at the UN reported to the General Assembly in March that there was substantial evidence that Netanyahu was committing the crime against humanity of exterminating the Palestinian people in Gaza only validates what common sense alone readily realizes. Bombings, the destruction of hospitals, intentional starvation, or mass re-location had been documented and evaluated by the UN as constituting the crime against humanity of extermination of a people.

Also on April 3, 2025, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders vociferously called on his colleagues to vote to block more than $8.8 billion in upcoming arms-sales to Israel, which the Senate overwhelmingly voted not to ban. “What we are talking about is a mass atrocity, and what makes it even worse,” Sanders said in his floor-speech, “is that we as Americans are deeply complicit in all that is happening in Gaza.”[4] Apparently, political donations from defense contractors mean a lot to U.S. Senators, though loyalty to Israel could be held to be unconditional, ethically speaking, to some Senators, for both explanations are likely in play given the sheer number of senators who voted against banning the very type of bombs that Israel’s military had been using against even civilian homes, hospitals, and even fertility clinics.

Viktor Orban ignored the warning that the E.U.’s executive branch, the Commission, had directed to him in 2024, when he invited Netanyahu to Hungary.[5] Not even six months later, Orban welcomed the alleged war criminal to Budapest anyway, and even gave him a full state-ceremony. Much of the attention on the state visit was on the fact that Orban was ignoring the ICC’s arrest warrant even though Hungary was still a signatory as agreeing to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. Because ignoring that international court and even the United Nations had by 2025 become part of the international status quo, as evinced by the Russian and Israeli governments, Orban’s willful disregard of his duty to have the alleged war criminal arrested could be greeted with a yawn.

The European Union is different because governmental sovereignty was divided in the founding between the state governments and the Union’s governmental branches, which includes the European Commission. Whereas in the U.S., the sovereignty assigned to the Union is referred to as enumerated powers, the delegated areas of governmental sovereignty of the Union are called competencies. Even the voting mechanism of qualified majority rule, which applies to some of the competencies, means that the E.U. state governments are not sovereign states. Just as when the U.S. was young, the E.U. even as of 2025 still vested most governmental sovereignty as retained by the states. Doing so risks dissolution of the union, as the U.S. discovered in 1861.

Even back in 1831, the government of the U.S.  member-state of South Carolina passed the Nullification Acts, whereby that state’s government could unilaterally invalidate any federal law or regulation within that state's borders. I submit that the E.U. state of Hungary did likewise in 2025 when Israel’s sitting prime minister landed in Hungary without being arrested. For as stipulated by the Rome Statute, and a statute is something more than a mere international agreement, the E.U. states are required to arrest individuals wanted by the International Court of Justice if they enter the territories of the respective states. That the obligation is part of the international legal framework on which the ICC relies is qualitatively different than the status of a federal statute of a union in which sovereignty is split (and shared). 

Just as U.S. President Andrew Jackson did not let South Carolina’s nullification law stand, E.U. President Ursula von der Leyen faced the necessity of seeing that state governments do not get away with ignoring E.U. law. For if such dismissiveness were to become the norm, the E.U. itself would eventually fall apart, especially given the imbalance of governmental sovereignty. Even just to commit the category mistake of treating a federal system of dual sovereignty as if it were of the same genus as international organizations is to undercut and even belie the former. I submit that Viktor Orban was guilty of this too.

It is interesting that so much can occur on the same day—that even though not causal in nature, combines to furnish an ethical and political meaning that is like a snapshot of the underlying dynamics stretching over continents. The sheer impunity of both Netanyahu and Orban, respecting international law and E.U. federal law, respectively, is, I submit, a red-flag pointing to the decadence of the post-1945 world order. That the U.N. itself was largely relegated as impotent to the sidelines with respect not only to Israel, but also Putin in Russia, can be taken as reason enough for a new world order. Unfortunately, the tyranny of the status quo has various levers at its disposal to keep political development from occurring even as fires rage on the ground.

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1. Gavin Blackburn, “At Least 50 People Killed in Overnight Israeli Air Strikes Across Gaza, Hospital Officials Say,” Euronews.com, April 4, 2025.
2. David Gritten, “Israeli Strike on Gaza City School Kills 27, Health Ministry Says,” BBC.com, April 3, 2025.
3. Julia Frankel and Samy Magdy, “Israel’s Cutoff of Supplies to Gaza Sends Prices Soaring as Aid Stockpiles Dwindle,” The Associated Press (apnews.com), March 5, 2025.
4. Sanjana Karanth, “Bernie Sanders Condemns ‘Deeply Complicit’ Congress Before Vote On Weapons Sales to Israel,” The Huffington Post, April 3, 2025.
5. Shona Murray and Jorge Liboreiro, “Brussels Warns Orban over Netanyahu Visit: It’s Your Duty to Comply with ICC Warrants,” Euronews, November 11, 2024.

Euroskeptic Federalism: Obstructing the E.U.'s Recognition of Palestine

Just because U.S. federalism deposits foreign policy exclusively with governmental institutions at the federal level does not mean that that domain cannot be shared between state and federal governments in a federal system. This was precisely the case in the E.U. as it struggled to come up with a unified response to Israel having ignored the verdict of the World Court—the UN’s court—ordering Israel to cease and decease from invading Rafah from May 24, 2024 onward. Meanwhile, two of the E.U.’s states were poised to recognize Palestine. Such emphasis on the state governments playing the leading role is fraught with difficulties even though in theory there is on reason why foreign policy cannot be a competency, or domain, that is shared at the state and federal “levels.” In federalism, the federal and state governmental systems are on par, rather than one of the governmental systems being above the other, so “levels” is misleading. Even so, a lot can be said for delegating foreign policy to the federal level. This can be seen from the state and federal reactions in the E.U. as Israel continued its invasion of Rafah just after the World Court had ruled that Israel would be violating international law and the UN’s charter in continuing the offensive.

The full essay is at "The E.U. on Israel."

Free Speech in the E.U.: Criminalizing Denials of Genocides

While the world continued to look on—like an impotent rich man who cannot afford Viagra—as a genocide was taking place in Syria (i.e., the systemic killing of a group—in this case, of pro-democracy demonstrators), France’s state senate approved a bill on January 23, 2012 criminalizing the denial of officially recognized genocides, which according to the state includes the Nazi Holocaust and the Turkish killing of Armenians beginning in 1915. In the twenty-first century, fining people and putting them in prison for not wanting to remember things so horrible evinces the same kind of nationalist thinking that had led the twentieth to be the bloodiest century. In contradistinction to that decadent century, turning a new leaf following the Arab spring in the twenty-first is a far better strategy.

Beyond the obvious matter of free speech, which admittedly is not absolute even in America, it should be asked whether law is an efficacious means of barring or changing thoughts. On the day of the vote, a study was released at the Bundestag in Berlin reporting that twenty percent of that state’s population was still anti-sematic. I don’t believe penalizing that prejudice itself (i.e., as a belief apart from any conduct) by the state’s police power forces any change at that level. At most, people would simply hide it—and how would such repression burst out in conduct? I submit it would be better simply to ignore the thoughts and concentrate on conduct.

Europe has had a tendency to codify thoughts as if they belong to the state. In America, that realm is province of the “thought police” that sprang up (as self-appointed) during the 1990s as “political correctness.”  At least with political correctness (such as in saying humankind rather than mankind, and Native American rather than American Indian), the self-appointed enforcer can be told to go to hell. The natural reaction to being accosted in such a presumptuous and pernicious way is to say precisely that which is not desired by the aggressor. Adding the police power of the state to enforce certain beliefs by penalizing others is dangerous not only for society itself, but also for individuals in terms of our quality of life free from anxiety. The over-reaching may even be immoral; it is certainly weakness.

A person may be able to control one’s own conduct more than one’s ideas or beliefs. Besides the futility of law in going after a person’s interior mental life, that domain is inherently beyond the unwanted control of another person. The French law would include up to a year in prison and a fine of about $58,000 for anyone who denies an officially-recognized genocide. Is the reach of the law limited to public speeches or published writings, or are people of France to feel anxious at private parties in their own home? In terms of general anxiety, the law could cost the state’s entire population. Is effectively adding the Turkish killings nearly a century before to the German Holocaust worth this in France? It is not as if that E.U. state borders Turkey.

Therefore, behind the 127 to 86 vote is a rather basic category mistake with respect to jurisprudence. Taking the law beyond its native domain to enforce one’s agenda using the police power of the state undercuts law itself, and thus contributes to the downfall of its legitimacy, even in its proper realm. In other words, in over-reaching, a government can wind up with even less influence over its people through even criminal law.

Additionally, a refusal to respect another’s inalienable right to have certain ideas or beliefs is to treat the rational nature (i.e., thoughts or beliefs) itself as merely a means to one’s own designs, rather than as an end in itself. According to Kant, this is immoral because of the value that is rightfully in reason because it is the assigner of value and thus has absolute value. Treating that which has essentially undefined value (as the source thereof) as having value only in so far as it fits with one’s own ideas or beliefs is wrong.

Might it be, Nietzsche would surely add, that modern moralizers are immoral rather than what we take ourselves to be? Who are the aggressors—les esprits méchants et perniceux? Might it be that human beings are far too presumptuous in what we think we know to venture into any other man’s head with impunity? Am I understood? This medicine is not meant for the weak, Nietzsche warns, who nonetheless have an uncontrollable urge to dominate. These new birds of prey are not entitled to dominate, and yet they somehow convince the strong—through thou shalt not—to be ashamed of those thoughts come out of their innate, self-confident strength. Be ashamed of who you are. The strong self-overcome their most willful instincts in order to experience the pleasure of power that naturally goes with their strength. The weak who seek to dominate, on the other hand, are driven by their instinct to overcome the resistance of others by passive aggression (owing to the weakness of the instinct, which they can’t seem to resist anyway) and cruelty (including genocides). Hitler was weak, but so too is the presumption to punish others for their beliefs in retaliation. Birds of a feather, these new birds of prey most certainly are. It is amazing they can even fly.

“By aiming at more [in pride],” Augustine proclaims in City of God (bk 14, ch.13), “a man is diminished.” Pride, by the way, is not self-confident strength, for self-overcoming is blocked by self-idolatry. Perhaps expressing the belief in over-reaching, which is an idea of the immoral and weak, should itself be punishable by a year in prison. This would probably only strengthen the belief, which in turn would weaken the believer even as he or she presumes to be more moral as a self-denying martyr. Lest the advocates of victims become ourselves victimizers (e.g., the Crusaders), it is a good policy for a general population to keep an eye on us too, for we can get quite carried away as moral zealots without realizing how we are affecting others (i.e., rational nature of others). That there have been (and will be) victims of horrible things in the world, does not give anyone the right to punish others for their thoughts or beliefs, for such intangibles are our inner castles, not to be treated like sand by pushy waves.

Fortunately, good sense prevailed and the French Constitutional Council struck down the law that would have criminalized the denial of the Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks. “We consider the annulment of the legislation by the Constitutional Council as a step that complies with the principles of freedom of expression and research, the rule of law and international law in France,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said after the Council’s decision. This statement is ironic, given that the accession of Turkey into the E.U. had been held up in part out of concern in Europe that Turkey was not yet sufficiently ensconced in Western values. Perhaps it should have been asked whether France should be a state of the E.U.

Sources:

Scott Sayare and Sebnem Arsu, “Genocide Bill Angers Turks as It Passes in France,” The New York Times, January 23, 2012. 

Scott Sayare, “French Council Strikes Down Bill on Armenian Genocide Denial,” The New York Times, February 29, 2012.