On 11 May, 2026, the Foreign Ministers of the European Union took the unprecedented step of placing Israeli civilians and settlement organizations on the same list of sanctions as Hamas arch-terrorists.
Prime Minister Netanyahu condemned the distorted moral equivalence, and rightfully so. However, the more severe and urgent issue is not declarative but legal, and Israel has thus far failed to challenge the sanctions on their weakest point.
It is important to understand that the two regimes governing the sanctions for Israel and for Hamas are not legally comparable: while Hamas senior officials are listed under the counter-terrorism framework, anchored in UN resolutions and usually requiring a prior judicial decision, Israeli citizens are listed under the “global human rights sanctions regime”, which is a flexible, political mechanism completely at the discretion of the European foreign policy. This mechanism does not require a previous judicial ruling but is based on a mountain of paperwork that includes NGO reports, the European External Action Service memos and diplomatic communiques.
In Israel’s case, the EU chose to make use of this mechanism’s lowest tier, meant for “systemic or widespread” violations, a threshold far below the genocide and torture articles the regime purports to stop. Thus, an absurd situation has been created: a democratic ally and OECD member is granted less procedural protection than notorious terrorists.
The Israeli ineptitude in this matter is glaring: since the first list of sanction targets in April 2024 was made public, not a single annulment action has been filed before the General Court of the European Union by any of those targeted. This despite the landmark Kadi II ruling, which established that the burden of proof lies with the imposing authority, which is required to present a solid factual basis for each specific allegation.
The May 2026 sanctions package has fundamentally changed the equation, since the Council is focusing for the first time on organizations with legal personalities, budgets, and banking ties that a European asset freeze could paralyze. Organizations such as Amana and Regavim possess the institutional and financial capacity to conduct complex litigation, and they must leverage this, with state support.
It is imperative to act now, in a combination of three steps: first, coordinated annulment actions should be filed in Luxembourg within two months, framing the cases as a “stress test” for the sanctions regime as a whole. A single judicial annulment would expose the flimsy evidentiary basis of the entire enterprise.
In parallel, petitions should be encouraged in European national courts, where Israeli entities face banking enforcement, since the validity of regulations can be challenged in such proceedings as per Article 267 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.
Finally, an aggressive diplomatic campaign targeting member states who hold veto power is required, since the mechanism is fundamentally intergovernmental and political in nature – and so too is the path to dismantle it.
The Israeli government must further deploy a “counter-sanctions” toolkit that makes it clear that the EU’s instruments are not a derivative of law, but a political weaponization of legal proceedings. Now is the time to order the closure of the illegal consulates serving the Palestinian Authority in Jerusalem, impose heavy taxation and sanctions on EU-funded civil society organizations operating against the state, and ban European projects in Judea and Samaria that are carried out without Israeli authorization. Additional steps, such as revoking the residency visas of European officials and mounting an aggressive diplomatic campaign against member states, are essential to dismantle this mechanism from the foundation up.
Israel can choose to settle for tepid denunciations in the press, but it can also choose to wake up and take action, using all the tools at its disposal. Only a determined response will win this battle.
(First appeared in Hebrew in Israel Hayom)
