Israel’s aversion to a “two-state solution” to the Palestinian controversy should not prevent global powers from developing and even imposing a plan, according to the European Union’s top diplomat.
“That shouldn’t stop the rest of us from doing it on our own,” European Union High Representative Josep Borrell told reporters after a foreign affairs council meeting on Monday, per an unofficial translation. “And if the international community manages to build a solution, it will have to propose it, and if the proposal is not agreed upon, then, naturally, there is what is called leverage.”
Borrell has emerged as a voluble critic of Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza, a conflict ignited by Hamas’s rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7. Israeli officials have vowed to destroy Hamas and free the scores of hostages taken by the terrorist organization, but both tasks have proven difficult, and the accumulation of civilian casualties has galvanized international pressure for Israeli leaders to curb the conflict.
“The humanitarian situation [in Gaza] could not be worse,” Borrell said earlier Monday. “And every day, there is a high toll of civilian people being killed. Many ministers have said that there are ‘too many.’ Well, the question is: How many is ‘too many’? What does it mean ‘too many’? [Is] too many 25,000 people? For how long is this going to continue?”
Last week, Borrell suggested that “the international community will have to impose” a two-state solution. His public pressure is opening a rift between the European Union and Israel. “He decided to choose sides; he decided to go all the way against Israel,” a senior Israeli official told the Wall Street Journal. “He is not representing the EU position. … He is causing damage to the EU by putting himself on one side. He is causing damage to the relationship between Israel and the EU.”
Israeli officials have justified the continuation of the conflict in part by arguing that only “military pressure” induced Hamas to release 105 hostages during a truce at the end of November. The collapse of that truce dismayed the relatives of the roughly 130 hostages still in Gaza, some of whom stormed a parliamentary committee meeting on Monday to demand that the government step up its efforts to negotiate their release.
“We’re trying to attract attention,” Aviram Meir, the uncle of a man kidnapped from the music festival where Hamas reportedly murdered more than 260 other partygoers, told the Times of Israel. “We have been forgotten among the country’s endless problems and this is the most urgent problem, above all other problems.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war Cabinet reportedly has proposed a two-month halt to the conflict in exchange for the release of the hostages, but Netanyahu wants to preserve his strategic goal of “destroying” the terrorists who perpetrated the Oct. 7 attack.
“We will continue to fight with full force until we achieve all of our goals: returning our hostages. And I say — only continued military pressure will lead to their release, eliminating Hamas and ensuring that Gaza never again constitutes a threat to Israel,” Netanyahu said Thursday. “Halting the war before our goals are achieved will harm Israel’s security for generations.”
Netanyahu has pledged also that he will “not compromise on full Israeli security control over all the territory west of the Jordan.” The Times of Israel reads that statement as “leaving the door open slightly for a demilitarized Palestinian state,” but his comments have been interpreted by many international observers as a rebuff of a two-state solution.
“Nothing new — he’s been against it for 30 years,” Borrell said.
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The EU diplomatic chief circulated a white paper to stoke discussion of a prospective deal ahead of Monday’s foreign affairs council meeting, an assembly that included several Middle Eastern foreign ministers invited for the occasion. Yet Borrell was not impressed by the Israeli foreign minister’s presentation.
“We had had the pleasure of watching two very interesting videos, one about an artificial island project to serve as a port … and another one about a project to build a railroad line linking the Middle East with India,” he told reporters. “I think the minister could have made better use of his time to worry about the security of his country and the high number of deaths in the Middle East and the high death toll in Gaza.”