On Monday, EU foreign affairs chief Kaja Kallas announced a political agreement to sanction Israeli extremist settlers and entities.
”We will continue to build across every hill and valley of Judea and Samaria, without apology and without pause,” said Amichai Chikli, Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism.
Israeli Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combatig Antisemitism, Amichai Chikli, calleed the EU decision to sanction Jewish civil society organizations in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) together and at the same time Hamas terrorists ‘’pathological, grotesquea and an unprecedented moral collapse in Europe’s policy toward Israel.’’
EU foreign policy chief announced Monday the decision followinga meeting of EU Foreign Ministers in Brussels. ‘’We have seen the surge of settler violence in the West Bank. Today, we reached a political agreement to sanction Israeli extremist settlers and entities. This goes together with new sanctions on leading Hamas figures. This means that we move from the political deadlock that was there for a long time. Violence and extremism carry consequences,’’ she told a press conference.
She said that the ministers also had a discussion on’’limiting trade with illegal Israeli settlements. ‘’There was also a call by many Member States to take this forward. So, we will continue to work with the European Commission on presenting proposals,’’ she said.
On X, Minister Chikli wrote: ‘’If Ms. Kallas believes this decree will uproot even a single Jew from his ancestral homeland, she is deeply mistaken. It will achieve nothing of the sort.’’
‘’The European Union has become a decaying superstructure that has brought ruin and cultural suicide upon Europe’s nation states,’’ he said.
‘’It is consumed from within by obsessive hatred of Israel and raw antisemitis,’’ he added.
The minister noted that ‘’Brussels, the EU’s own capital, and Belgium, which just this week filed criminal charges against Jewish mohels, are rapidly turning into Judenrein zones.’’
‘’For Kaja Kallas this is still insufficient. She demands that Judea too must be made Judenrein.This is pure, unadulterated antisemitism: the delegitimization of Jews simply for living in their biblical heartland, the dehumanization that equates Jewish families and builders with the barbaric rapists and child murderers of Hamas, and the obscene moral inversion that punishes the victims while shielding the butchers.’’
He said that ‘’we will continue to build across every hill and valley of Judea and Samaria, without apology and without pause.’’
Earlier, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saaralso slammed the EU decision as “arbitrary and political,” accusing the EU of targeting Israeli citizens “because of their political views and without any basis.” “Israel has stood, stands, and will continue to stand for the right of Jews to settle in the heart of our homeland,” he wrote on X.
He denounced the ”outrageous intolerable” parallel drawn between Israeli citizens and Hamas terrorists, which he said, ‘’is a completely morally distorted comparison,”
While the measure to sanction Israeli settlers, which needed unanimity, was on the table of the ministers since several months, it had been repeatedly blocked by Hungary. But with the change of government in Budapest, incoming Prime Minister Peter Magyar signaled he would not stand in the way of sanctions unlike his predecessor Viktor Orban