There is a particular arrogance that Europe reserves for the Jewish people, and the European Union’s latest round of “human rights” sanctions has put it on full display.
The E.U.’s global human-rights sanctions regime exists, we are told, to punish the world’s torturers and executioners—the architects of genocide, the operators of prison camps, the men who order extrajudicial killings. It sits in judgment over the butchers of Pyongyang and the torturers of Tehran.
And now, onto that same list, the European Union has placed Israeli Jews and Jewish organizations, whose offense is attempting to build homes in the historic Jewish heartland of Judea and Samaria.
Consider what this equivalence asserts. To appear on this register is to be classified, in the moral architecture of the European Union, alongside men who torture dissidents to death and make their own citizens disappear. A Jew laying a foundation for a house is treated as a creature of the same genus as those who ran Syrian dictator Bashar Assad’s torture cells. One wonders whether the bureaucrats who drafted these designations paused, even once, to read their own list back to themselves.
Take Daniella Weiss, a grandmother and a lifelong advocate for Jewish settlement. Whatever one thinks of her politics—and many Israelis disagree with them sharply—she is being sanctioned by a continental superpower as though she were a war criminal. Her actual activity is ideological and political: She promotes Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria. That is a matter for democratic argument, not for an asset freeze and a travel ban handed down by foreign ministries that answer to no Israeli voter.
And here, the European Union would prefer that you did not look too closely at the law it claims to serve.
The Jewish people’s right to settle this land is not a fringe assertion; it rests on the clearest chain of instruments in modern international law. The San Remo Resolution of 1920 and the League of Nations Mandate of 1922 recognized the historical connection of the Jewish people to this land and called explicitly for close Jewish settlement upon it. When the League dissolved, Article 80 of the U.N. Charter preserved those rights.
Under the principle of uti possidetis juris, by which a new state inherits the borders of the prior administrative entity, Israel has the strongest title because no recognized sovereign ever lawfully held Judea and Samaria after the British Mandate. Jordan’s annexation was recognized by exactly two countries.
As for the Fourth Geneva Convention, which is endlessly waved at Jewish communities, it was drafted in 1949 to stop Nazi-style mass deportations and forced demographic engineering. It bars a state from forcibly transferring populations. It does not bar a private individual of any faith from choosing to live somewhere. Reading it to make Jewish residence—and only Jewish residence—uniquely criminal is not a legal conclusion. It is a political choice wearing legal costume, closer in spirit to the restrictive covenants once used to keep black Americans out of white neighborhoods than to anything resembling human-rights law.
Now to the charge that animates these sanctions: “settler violence.” It is worth saying plainly that violence by Jews against Palestinians does occur. But the phrase has been inflated into something the data does not support.
A detailed report by the Regavim organization examined roughly 8,500 incidents the United Nations had filed under the “settler” heading over seven years and found that large portions were nothing of the kind: Jewish hikers accused of trespass, Jews visiting the Temple Mount, Jews defending themselves after being attacked.
Strip out the misclassifications, and the genuinely serious cases shrink to roughly 10% of the original libelous pile.
Meanwhile, attacks on Jewish civilians are not merely committed but celebrated. In fact, the Palestinian Authority has paid salaries to those who carry them out.
Here is the part the European Union treats as beneath its notice. Israel is a state with courts. When settlers commit acts of violence, the Israeli police investigate and the prosecution brings charges. Israelis argue among themselves about how that enforcement works: Some think it is excessive, some think it is too weak. But the cases are, in fact, pursued by Israel’s own police, answerable to Israel’s own public and judicial system.
That is what a functioning democracy does. The European Union does not regard it as sufficient. It has appointed itself the supervising authority, standing in loco parentis over the Jewish state, as though Israel were a ward incapable of governing its own affairs and Europe the responsible adult.
There is a long and ugly history behind that posture. For centuries, European powers presumed to decide where Jews could live, what they could own, and whether they could be trusted to manage their own affairs. The presumption did not end well. That the same continent now issues edicts about which hilltops Jews may inhabit, draped in the vocabulary of human rights, is not a coincidence of tone. It is the old reflex in a new uniform.
The selectivity gives the game away. And the United Nations, whose moral grammar the European Union so faithfully echoes, supplies the proof. Between 2015 and 2024, a decade in which war and terror killed something on the order of 2.5 million people worldwide, the U.N. General Assembly adopted 173 resolutions condemning Israel and roughly 80 condemning every other nation on earth combined. Not Syria. Not North Korea. And not the regimes that actually operate the prison camps and torture chambers.
A planet does not produce that distribution of outrage by accident. It produces it by obsession.
So let us state plainly what the logic of these sanctions implies. If the gravest human-rights problem in the region that European officials can identify is Jews building houses, then the unspoken remedy is a Judea and Samaria with fewer Jews in it, and ultimately, none. There is a word for a territory scrubbed clean of its Jews. The Germans gave it to us: Judenrein.
That is the endpoint toward which this logic points, and the self-styled moral superintendents of Brussels should sit with it before they publish their next list.
They imagine that they are defending human rights. What they are defending is their own ancient presumed prerogative to sit in judgment over the Jews—a prerogative they never earned and have repeatedly disgraced with perennially bloody results.
