Lobby Watch 5 March 2025
Sven Koopmans, until recently the EU’s special representative for the Middle East peace process. (College of Europe)
For almost four years, Sven Koopmans has been known as the European Union’s special representative for the Middle East peace process.
That lofty title appears to have given him delusions of grandeur.
He has behaved as if transparency – nominally a sacrosanct principle in Brussels – has nothing to do with him.
One of the final decisions Koopmans took before stepping down from his post a few days ago was to reject my freedom of information request that he publish correspondence between him and the American Jewish Committee (AJC), a pro-Israel lobby group.
Koopmans admitted that he had been in contact with the AJC by email a number of times in September last year. But he refused to release the messages as doing so would “harm the environment of mutual trust with the AJC, compromising future dialogue with an important stakeholder of the region.”
Disclosure of the messages would, he claimed, “expose to the general public” what “strategy” Koopmans had been following. Shedding light on Koopmans’ activities carried the risk of “possible malicious foreign interference and attempts to influence his own decision-making process,” he added.
Koopmans invoked similar excuses when turning down a previous request I had made for access to his appointments diary – a simple log of his professional activities that cannot seriously be viewed as sensitive.
Why all this secrecy?
Koopmans’ only possible achievement over the past four years is that he may have set a new world record for the number of times a diplomat used the words “two-state solution.”
The very idea that releasing a few documents would threaten “malicious foreign inference” is laughable. A far more probable explanation is that Koopmans wants to keep his cordial relationship with Israel and its supporters under wraps so that the dreaded general public will not be alerted to his lack of impartiality.
Meddling accommodated
The activities of Israel and its lobbying network certainly constitute foreign interference in the EU’s work. Rather than regarding the meddling as malicious, the Brussels bureaucracy accommodates the meddling.
In two recent statements, the EU’s leadership showed that it is promoting a dishonest narrative in which Israel is cast as a beleaguered state forced to fight “terrorism.”
The first statement expresses “grave concern about the consequences of the Israeli military operation against armed militants in the refugee camps of the northern West Bank.” The statement then urges Israel to “comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law” while “addressing its security concerns in the occupied West Bank.”
Contrary to what the EU implies, Israel does not have legitimate “security concerns” in the West Bank.
An army enforcing an occupation that has been deemed illegal by the International Court of Justice has no right whatsoever to inflict violence on a people under occupation. By contrast, the people under occupation have a right affirmed by the UN to resist the colonization and theft of their homeland.
Despite genuflecting before international law, the European Union is really trying to eviscerate its central tenets.
The second statement “condemns the refusal of Hamas to accept the extension of the first phrase of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza.” The “subsequent decision” by Israel to block aid “could potentially result in humanitarian consequences.”
The actual truth is that the latest crisis is the fault of Israel. If it respected the ceasefire deal, Israel would have moved toward the second phase, under which all its troops have to be withdrawn from Gaza.
And Israel’s decision to block aid is not simply worrying because it could “potentially result in humanitarian consequences.” Rather, it is another instance in which Israel is using starvation as a weapon against Palestinians.
It constitutes a war crime.
As Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar is part of a government that continues to wage a genocidal war against Gaza and cause mass displacement in the occupied West Bank. He and his colleagues should, therefore, be arrested if they travel abroad.
Displaying contempt for international law, numerous EU bigwigs glad-handed Saar when he visited Brussels last week. Among them were Roberta Metsola, the president of the European Parliament.
While Saar was posing for photos with Metsola, two of her fellow lawmakers in the European Parliament were flying toward Palestine. They and the officials accompanying them were denied entry by the authorities in Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport and then deported.Israel’s behavior was overtly racist. One of the lawmakers, Rima Hassan, is a Palestinian elected in France, who has been vilified by the pro-Israel lobby.
Israel was also obstructing the work of an EU institution. The other lawmaker denied entry was Ireland’s Lynn Boylan, who chairs the European Parliament’s committee (“delegation” as it is formally called) for relations with Palestine.
To date, Metsola has not issued any words of criticism against Israel for the way it denied entry to her colleagues. When I contacted the European Parliament’s press service seeking an explanation for her silence, I received a boilerplate response: “All members of the European Parliament should be treated with respect, also while on official missions.”
Boylan told me by phone that “I’ve reached out to her [Metsola].”
“I’m hoping to have a meeting [with Metsola] as soon as possible and that there will be a public statement following that meeting,” Boylan added.
If Metsola voices displeasure belatedly, that will not erase her disgraceful record. As the war of extermination against Gaza got underway in October 2023, she assured Israel that “we stand with you.”
The European Union’s bosses are still standing with Israel despite all the destruction it has inflicted on Gaza in the interim. They gave Saar a commitment to buy more gas from Israel during his Brussels visit.
Not only has Israel been allowed to get away with mass murder, the EU is rewarding it for genocide.
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