Privileged Partnership Under Strain: How War in Gaza Challenged European-Israeli Relations

Israel occupies a distinctive place in the European collective imagination, a position reflected both in the intensity of political debates surrounding the Middle Eastern partner and in the breadth of academic literature devoted to Euro–Israeli relations. Despite persistent political tensions, the European Union officially describes its cooperation with Israel as “one of the most wide-ranging and deepest relationships that the EU enjoys with any third country in the world.” Particularly striking is the continuity of this relationship in recent years, despite intensified efforts to delegitimise Israel and its policies. European states have faced growing pressure from international organisations, non-governmental organisations, judicial bodies, and waves of pro-Palestinian mobilisation at the domestic level. Nevertheless, aside from increasingly critical rhetoric by European political elites, the European reaction to the war in Gaza have remained relatively moderate. This coexistence of diplomatic frictions on the one hand and sustained strategic and economic cooperation on the other is not new phenomenon, but it has become more pronounced since the outbreak of the Gaza war. Existing explanations of this discrepancy have pointed to factors such as shared political values, cultural affinity, strategic interests, neo-colonial mindset, or domestic political considerations within European states. While each of these approaches offers important insights, this presentation argues that none fully accounts for the long-term dynamics of Euro–Israeli relations. Instead, the concept of identity closeness is proposed as an alternative explanatory framework. It grounds inter-state affinity in shared experience of polities, economies and societies. The presentation pursues two main objectives. First, it seeks to explain the relatively restrained responses of European actors to Israel’s conduct during the Gaza war (from the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 to the third ceasefire reached by warring parties on 9 October 2025) through the lens of identity closeness. Second, it explores possible future trajectories of Euro–Israeli relations by developing alternative scenarios informed by this conceptual framework. The argument proceeds in four steps. It begins with a review of the state of the art on Euro–Israeli relations, followed by an assessment of the limitations of existing explanatory approaches. It then introduces the concept of identity closeness as a tool for analysing the persistence and resilience of cooperation. Finally, it applies this framework to an analysis of Euro–Israeli relations during the Gaza war. The presentation concludes by outlining potential scenario for the future transformation of the European–Israeli cooperation.