At a moment when headlines paint the Israel-EU relationship as one in freefall, Ben-Gurion University professor Sharon Pardo sat down with host Jacob Laznik on The Deep Dive to offer a far more nuanced and sobering picture.
Pardo, who has spent 25 years studying EU-Israel relations, presented findings from a landmark study conducted with the Jerusalem People’s Policy Institute (JPPI), which analyzed over 24,000 statements issued by the European External Action Service between 2017 and April 2026. The numbers are striking: even before October 7, 38% of EU statements regarding Israel were negative, with only 13% positive. After the Hamas massacre, negativity surged to 46%, a figure Pardo calls an “obsessive and unhealthy preoccupation” that undermines Europe’s own ambitions to be a credible mediator in the Middle East.
Perhaps the most jaw-dropping comparison: Qatar, despite its role in the infamous Qatargate bribery scandal that engulfed the European Parliament, still received 66% positive statements from the very same EU body.
Yet the story gets more complicated, and more revealing, when you peel back the public posturing. Pardo reveals that behind the rhetoric of boycotts and condemnations, bilateral trade, intelligence cooperation, and arms dealings between Israel and key European states like France and Germany have continued largely uninterrupted.
As one unnamed European ambassador bluntly told him, the boycott flows only one way, while weapons sales continue as normal. This disconnect between institutional EU statements and national-level behavior is at the heart of Pardo’s research, raising urgent questions about who is really driving European foreign policy and at what cost.
That cost, Pardo argues, is being paid most dearly not in Brussels or Jerusalem, but by Europe’s 1.3 million Jews, who have been left to navigate a surge in violent antisemitic incidents largely on their own, abandoned by an Israel consumed by war and an EU that still refuses to classify these attacks as terrorism.
What makes this episode essential viewing is the clarity and candor with which Pardo lays out a case that implicates both sides. Israel, he argues, has never developed a coherent strategy toward the EU, one of its largest trade partners, accounting for 32% of all Israeli merchandise trade, and its number one partner in research and development. With the next EU Framework Program for R&D, worth €140 billion, now under negotiation and voices calling for Israel’s exclusion growing louder, the stakes could not be higher.
Laznik and Pardo don’t shy away from the uncomfortable reality that Israel’s political paralysis, consumed by elections and ongoing war, may be making a bad situation dramatically worse. Whether Israel has the will to wake up to this reality before the damage becomes irreversible is the question the two leave hanging in the air.
