How the EU Subcontracts Its Middle East Policy to NGOs

For over two decades, the European Union has effectively allowed nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to interfere in the Israel-Palestinian conflict on its behalf. The results, writes Gerald Steinberg, have been very damaging:

In 1995, the European Union’s Barcelona Conference launched the grand-sounding Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, a massive effort encompassing the countries of North Africa, Israel, Syria, and Jordan. The main objective was to establish economic and political frameworks to stabilize the Arab regimes; the second goal was to compete with the U.S. in Arab-Israeli peace making after Oslo.

Both missions failed. But in the process and through a very large budget, the EU built alliances with a number of highly politicized NGOs. . . . [It] began bankrolling dozens of such institutions, including the [far left-wing] Israeli organizations B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and Adalah and the radical Palestinian political NGO Applied Research Institute Jerusalem (ARIJ), [which receives] close to €1 million annually. This NGO funding was and still is decided in great secrecy and without external oversight. . . .

This outsourcing and mutual dependence is critical to understanding the ways in which EU officials in Brussels promote their objectives, interests, and prejudices regarding the Middle East peace process, which have remained unchanged in the two decades since the Barcelona conference. For officials in [the EU’s foreign-policy wing], these NGOs are the main point of contact with Israeli society. By making connections, writing reports, and providing analyses, NGO officials fill in for missing EU capabilities, while hundreds of NGO employees, in turn, get EU funding. This creates a kind of vicious circle—the EU funds NGOs which confirm EU biases and then get more EU funding.

The process reinforces the biases already held among many EU officials, based on images of Palestinian victimization and overwhelming Israeli power, without countervailing views or more nuanced and complex analyses. . . .

[Furthermore, for] many of [these NGOs], the goal is not merely Israeli withdrawal [from the West Bank] but the elimination of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

Read more at Watching the Watchers

More about: Breaking the Silence, European Union, Israel & Zionism, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, NGO

American Middle East Policy Should Focus Less on Stability and More on Weakening Enemies

Feb. 10 2025

To Elliott Abrams, Donald Trump’s plan to remove the entire population of Gaza while the Strip is rebuilt is “unworkable,” at least “as a concrete proposal.” But it is welcome insofar as “its sheer iconoclasm might lead to a healthy rethinking of U.S. strategy and perhaps of Arab and Israeli policies as well.” The U.S., writes Abrams, must not only move beyond the failed approach to Gaza, but also must reject other assumptions that have failed time and again. One is the commitment to an illusory stability:

For two decades, what American policymakers have called “stability” has meant the preservation of the situation in which Gaza was entirely under Hamas control, Hizballah dominated Lebanon, and Iran’s nuclear program advanced. A better term for that situation would have been “erosion,” as U.S. influence steadily slipped away and Washington’s allies became less secure. Now, the United States has a chance to stop that process and aim instead for “reinforcement”: bolstering its interests and allies and actively weakening its adversaries. The result would be a region where threats diminish and U.S. alliances grow stronger.

Such an approach must be applied above all to the greatest threat in today’s Middle East, that of a nuclear Iran:

Trump clearly remains open to the possibility (however small) that an aging [Iranian supreme leader Ali] Khamenei, after witnessing the collapse of [his regional proxies], mulling the possibility of brutal economic sanctions, and being fully aware of the restiveness of his own population, would accept an agreement that stops the nuclear-weapons program and halts payments and arms shipments to Iran’s proxies. But Trump should be equally aware of the trap Khamenei might be setting for him: a phony new negotiation meant to ensnare Washington in talks for years, with Tehran’s negotiators leading Trump on with the mirage of a successful deal and a Nobel Peace Prize at the end of the road while the Iranian nuclear-weapons program grows in the shadows.

Read more at Foreign Affairs

More about: Iran, Middle East, U.S. Foreign policy