More Important Than Other Conflicts: The Uniqueness of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict in EC/EU Discourse

Abstract

Why has the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, or the Israeli–Arab conflict/the conflict in the Middle East, as it was called in official EC/EU language all the way up to the 2000s, dominated European foreign policy discourse for over five decades now? Beginning with the 1967 war, which was widely perceived in Europe to be a “golden opportunity” for the EC to unite its foreign policy in the late 1960s and early 70s, this chapter analyzes all EC/EU statements—820 in total (please see the Coding Schedule in the appendix)—published in the Bulletin of the European Communities and Bulletin of the European Union between 1967 and 2009. It asks the question how the EC/EU could go from being fully supportive of Israel and uncritical of the occupation in the years after the 1967 war to become supportive of a Palestinian state and one of the leading international critics of Israel’s occupation a few decades later and then back again in the 2000s to be more and more critical of the Palestinians and less and less critical of Israel?

Coding Schedule

See Table 6.1.

Table 6.1 Bulletin of the European Communities and Bulletin of the European Union coding schedule