EU antisemitism tsar lobbied against Israel sanctions

A senior EU official has been lobbying against Israel sanctions using bogus claims of antisemitism, according to a leaked diplomatic cable.

Katharina von Schnurbein, the EU Commission's "coordinator on combating antisemitism", made the claims in a meeting with EU ambassadors in Tel Aviv on 29 May — in the middle of EU talks on possible trade sanctions against Israel.

She "warned against the risk that review of the [EU-Israel] association agreement is based on 'rumours about Jews', as opposed to facts", in one comment.

"News on IL [Israel] providing food in Gaza are ignored by the UN and media," she also said, in a second example.

And she "warned against new forms of antisemitism, which she described as 'ambient antisemitism', i.e. creating an atmosphere in which Jews feel uncomfortable, even in European institutions, noting, for instance, the 'bake sales for Gaza'."

The quotes come from a three-page readout of the meeting, sent by the EU embassy in Israel to its HQ in Brussels (the EU foreign service), dated 6 June, marked "sensitive", and published in full below.

Von Schnurbein is identified in the text by her initials as "KVS".

EUobserver redacted the identities of individual EU states' ambassadors, who also spoke at the meeting, to protect their diplomatic work.

The 25-year-old EU-Israel association agreement grants free-trade perks for Israeli arms, tech, wine, and cosmetics firms, worth at least €1bn a year.

It was put under "review" on 20 May due to Israel's human rights violations in Gaza, where it has killed over 57,000 people — in a process that could see the first-ever EU trade sanctions against Israel agreed on 15 July, when EU foreign ministers meet in Brussels.

Von Schnurbein's remarks that starvation in Gaza and other war crimes were mere "rumours" denigrated the factuality of reports by the EU Commission's own foreign service, by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), and the findings of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) — effectively trashing the whole UN system. 

Her phrase "about Jews", to describe allegations about Israeli state actions, framed those allegations as being ethnically motivated. 

And her nebulous claim that EU sanctions, as well as EU officials who baked cupcakes to raise funds for the Red Cross, a charity, could stoke "ambient antisemitism" even framed humanitarian gestures as a form of Jew-hatred.

Von Schnurbein and the EU foreign service declined to comment when contacted by EUobserver. 

But, in any case, she misread the room back in Tel Aviv.

Her "bake sale" briefing astonished some of the EU ambassadors around the table, EUobserver's source said.

They had also held "internal part" talks prior their "exchange of views" with her, the readout noted, in which five of them had specifically warned "against the temptation of labelling criticism toward IL [Israeli] government as 'antisemitism'."

There was "growing IL messaging in this respect," they'd said, including at a conference with Israeli foreign minister Gideon Sa'ar in Jerusalem on 27 May (which von Schnurbein had freshly attended). 

And one EU ambassador later told her face-to-face: "The IL side dismisses every accusation on attacks on hospitals as 'blood libels' ... [but] these are facts and to bring them up is not antisemitic". 

"The position of ... [several EU] governments (who could not be accused of having an anti-IL bias) towards the Israeli government was hardening, also due to the growing pressure by public opinion in their countries", said the EU diplomat (name withheld) who drafted the leaked cable.

Von Schnurbein's Tel Aviv remarks contained other pro-Israeli disinformation.  

She cited conspiracy theories that "[Palestinian militant group] Hamas or other extremist groups were behind" pro-Palestinian protests in Europe and claimed Hamas had the power to "skilfully ... shift [global] media attention". 

There was a "need to build a 'trust based' dialogue with Israel … losing IL would be a loss for Europe", she also said. 

EU disinformation

But for Eve Geddie, the head of Amnesty International's office in Brussels, von Schnurbein's portrayal of the Gaza situation was "not factual ... inaccurate, untruthful".

Von Schnurbein, who was a 52-year-old German baroness and a career EU official, had "no qualifications to judge Israel's compliance with international humanitarian law and no mandate on EU foreign policy, yet she challenged the findings of the world's top authorities in the field", Geddie said, referring to the OHCHR and ICJ.

Geddie described von Schnurbein's Tel Aviv language as having relied on a "worrying conflation of Jewish people in Europe with the state of Israel".

And even though some ambassadors at the event had pushed back on "blood libel" slurs, given her senior title, von Schnurbein's lobbying was still "very damaging ... not entirely easy to dismiss", Geddie said.

Amos Goldberg, a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, also said von Schnurbein had told half-truths.

Part of the EU tsar's line was that pro-Palestine protests had begun immediately after Hamas' notorious attack against Israeli civilians on 7 October, for instance, which implied the protests were pre-planned and unlinked to Israel's subsequent conduct.

But "she deliberately ignores the fact that Israel's air campaign and its leaders' genocidal and dehumanising discourse [against Palestinians] started on 7 October. The first month of this [Israeli] air campaign was the most lethal for children in the 21st century," Goldberg said.

Von Schnurbein was "clearly indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza ... she doesn't even mention it [in her Tel Aviv briefing]," he said.

"She's hostile to any sign of solidarity with the Palestinians, calling it 'ambient antisemitism' - a clearly totalitarian term," Goldberg said.

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