The EU’s decision on Monday to sanction settlement organizations under the guise of “settler violence” was predictably praised by Belgian Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot.
“These sanctions send a clear message,” he posted on X. “Extremism and violence carry consequences.”
Ah, if only that were true.
If it were true, if extremism and violence carried consequences, then Belgium would not have been one of a number of Western democracies announcing in the fall of 2025 that they would, less than two years after Palestinian terrorists carried out mass acts of unspeakable barbarism, recognize a Palestinian state.
If extremism and violence did indeed carry consequences, then Belgium, along with Britain, France, Canada, and Australia, would not have rewarded the Palestinians with statehood recognition.
No, this measure is not about sending a message about the consequences of extremism and violence. What it is, instead, is the continuation of an effort to delegitimize the entire settlement enterprise and to draw a distorted equivalence between settlers and Hamas.
“EU foreign ministers just gave the go-ahead to sanction Israeli settlers over violence against Palestinians,” the EU’s foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas posted on X. “They also agreed new sanctions on leading Hamas figures.”
There you have it - quintessential European Union even-handedness. Yes, we are sanctioning Israeli settlers, but we are also sanctioning leading Hamas figures. As if they are similar.
Israeli leaders reacted furiously. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar called the move “arbitrary and political,” and condemned what he termed the EU’s “completely distorted moral equivalence.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Europe had “exposed its moral bankruptcy by drawing a false symmetry between Israeli citizens and Hamas terrorists.”
That phrase - "false symmetry" - gets to the heart of the issue. The problem is not merely the sanctions themselves, but the worldview underpinning them: one that increasingly blurs the line between a democratic ally fighting terrorism and the terrorists themselves.
Let’s be clear: there are acts of violence by Jews against Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, and they are deplorable. They should be unequivocally condemned and fully prosecuted under the law. Denying that such incidents occur would be dishonest and counterproductive.
But acknowledging the existence of violent incidents is not the same thing as accepting the grotesquely inflated narrative that has grown around it.
That was one of the central arguments made in a recent report by Gabi Siboni and Erez Winner for the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security. The report argued that the issue has been systematically magnified by the anti-Israel UN body OCHA, by NGOs such as Breaking the Silence and B'Tselem, by selected European governments, and by large segments of the media.
The report did not claim there was no violence. In fact, it explicitly stated that violent acts by Jews against Palestinians “do occur” and “warrant unequivocal condemnation and full enforcement by the authorities.” But it argued that the scale and portrayal of the phenomenon have been radically distorted.
According to the study, while OCHA recorded thousands of alleged incidents involving Palestinians between 2023 and 2026, many of the cases categorized as “settler violence” involved things such as Jewish visits to the Temple Mount, hikes, archaeological activity, infrastructure work, or unverified Palestinian complaints. The report noted that only a small percentage of the allegations ultimately corresponded to cases that met the threshold for a police investigation.
The distortion becomes even more glaring when viewed in context. The report cited IDF data showing that between 2019 and 2022 there were 24,808 incidents of Palestinian stone-throwing and Molotov cocktail attacks against Jews - not including shootings, stabbings, or explosive devices. Yet it is “settler violence” that has become the focus of international sanctions campaigns and diplomatic outrage.
Why? Because this is not fundamentally about violence. It is about delegitimization.
Settler violence used to delegitimize Jewish settlement
Siboni and Winner argued that the campaign surrounding “settler violence” has become “a structured political instrument” designed to “delegitimize Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, generate international pressure on Israel, and lay the groundwork for a Palestinian state.”
Europe remains deeply attached to the two-state paradigm, even as much of the Israeli public - particularly after October 7 - has concluded that this is not something in their best interests. And that conclusion was not driven by settler violence, but by Palestinian extremism and terrorism.
A look at some of the organizations reportedly targeted by the EU further exposes the true aim of the sanctions. The inclusion of Amana and Regavim suggests this is not solely or even primarily about violence; Amana is tied to settlement development and financing, while Regavim focuses on opposing illegal Palestinian construction on state land, including projects supported by the EU.
That is what this is really about.
Sa’ar made that point directly, saying Israel “will continue to stand for the right of Jews to settle in the heart of our homeland,” and arguing that “no other people in the world has such a documented and longstanding right to its land as the Jewish people have to the Land of Israel.”
It is, however, also a disturbing sign of where things are headed. The EU, for a wide variety of reasons, including domestic politics and pressure from increasingly radical constituencies, is chomping at the bit to clamp down on Israel. Netanyahu himself suggested as much, saying European politicians are increasingly “coerced by their radical constituencies.”
For years, Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán effectively kept his finger in the dike, blocking many anti-Israel initiatives from reaching consensus within the EU. But with his recent ouster and the election of Péter Magyar, the dike has been unplugged.
In their study, Siboni and Winner suggested practical ways Israel could counter what they described as the false perception of rampant, unbridled settler violence: publishing transparent and verified data, aggressively exposing false complaints, tightening oversight over foreign-funded NGOs, and shifting to a much more proactive public diplomatic strategy.
Alongside that, however, Israel also needs traditional diplomatic action. It must cultivate other European leaders willing to stick a finger in the dike. Israel maintains strong ties with a number of EU states- including the Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltic states, and others - and needs to cultivate those alliances aggressively to thwart these kinds of resolutions.
Europe can criticize Israel, just as Israel can criticize Europe. But when that criticism crosses the line into moral distortion, it loses credibility.
When the EU adopts a narrative that inflates fringe violence into a defining characteristic of the more than 900,000 Jews living beyond the Green Line, including Jerusalem, while downplaying decades of Palestinian terrorism, it ceases to be an honest broker, loses its ability to be taken seriously in Israel, and instead becomes a political actor advancing a predetermined outcome. That is the real story behind these sanctions - and why Israel must push back hard against them.