Good morning, I’m Jack Power, Europe correspondent for The Irish Times based in Brussels, and filling in today for Denis Staunton while he is away.
On the same day Janez Jansa’s populist right-wing government took office in Slovenia this summer, Israel announced it would be opening an embassy in the small central European country.
Binyamin Netanyahu was delighted to see the back of Robert Golob, the previous Slovenian prime minister whose liberal party was unseated this June by a conservative coalition.
Under Golob’s government, Slovenia sat in a camp of pro-Palestine countries pushing for the European Union to take a much firmer stance against Israel.
Netanyahu has described the centrist Slovenian politician as “just about the most hostile” prime minister in Europe.
Domestically, Slovenia banned trade coming from occupied Palestinian territories, halted the sale or transit of arms to Israel, recognised the Palestinian state and instituted a travel ban on Netanyahu and extremist ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich.
Slovenia, the Republic of Ireland and Spain comprised an initial trio pushing Brussels to hold Israel to account. That coalition grew as the death toll in Gaza mounted.
The change of government has enabled Netanyahu to gain a close friend inside the EU. Jansa has become one of Israel’s most ardent defenders and will likely block any EU sanction that needs the unanimous sign-off from all 27 governments.
Announcing the decision to open an embassy in Ljubljana, the Slovenian capital, Israel’s foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar said the Jansa government marked a new chapter. “We now have an opportunity to rebuild, strengthen, and deepen a real partnership … When Israel’s friends return to power, Israel returns,” he said via a statement.
It is a clear-cut case of Netanyahu employing the diplomatic carrot in what has been a sustained effort to head off political sanction from Brussels.
The Israeli government has waged an intense behind-the-scenes campaign to dissuade European governments from backing any joint EU-level action in response to what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank.
According to diplomats and officials in Brussels, that often involves Israeli politicians insisting to allies, such as Germany, that they can effect greater change through quiet dialogue, rather than hard leverage.
The efforts helped to kill off a push to suspend an EU-Israel free trade deal in an “association agreement” governing relations.
It is understood Sa’ar spent considerable time on the phone with foreign ministers and the bloc’s high representative on foreign policy, Kaja Kallas, during periods when it seemed momentum was building to do something to restrain Israel’s actions.
The Israeli minister sold Kallas a deal last year promising to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza, just when support to suspend Israel’s tariff-free access to the EU market was creeping close to a required qualified majority.
Kallas was outplayed by Sa’ar on that occasion. It was only a US-brokered peace agreement several months later that eventually enabled significant supplies of food, water and more into Gaza.
Current political chatter centres on a proposed EU-wide ban ending trade with illegal Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territories. Talk had been parked for August, but foreign ministers would have returned to the subject at an EU council meeting in Wicklow.
National capitals that were already on the fence will be reluctant to back an Occupied Territories trade ban before Knesset elections in Israel next month. Don’t hold your breath for the EU to take a decision soon.
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