Once again—and in a big way—Europe has dropped the ball on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. 

The four European members of the United Nations Security Council: Britain, France, Germany and Portugal recently upbraided Israel for its settlement policies. Nothing new in this, except that the multilateral body charged with promoting the peace process, the Quartet, of which the European Union is a part (along with the United States, Russia and the United Nations) has called for a resumption of negotiations between the parties without preconditions. 

Recently though, Jordan did host talks with Israel and the Palestinians under the auspices of the Quartet. But the usual Palestinian laundry list of pre-conditions overtook any chance for direct negotiations, which remain the only chance for a settlement to be reached.  

Whatever one may think of the settler enterprise, it should be seen as but one in a basket of issues—including boundaries, security arrangements, Jerusalem, refugees—that presumably would be on the agenda at discussions between the parties  

The Palestinians have made an outright end to settlement activity the sine qua non for resuming talks. This has not always been the case, but for the past year-and-a-half, buttressed by the belief that they have serious international backing, they have used the issue as an excuse for not sitting down with Israel. Their thinking says, “Let the big guys do the heavy lifting for us.” 

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during the same time period, has called for an immediate resumption of discussions without preconditions. And the Israelis could make a few themselves: incitement, for one. Since solemnly promising to end incitement against Israel and Jews when signing the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Palestinians have day-in and day-out demonized both. The most recent example is a UNESCO-funded Palestinian youth magazine, Zayzafuna, which earlier this year carried an article praising Hitler’s murder of the Jews. When revealed by the watchdog group Palestinian Media Watch, and some Jewish organizations (amongst them B’nai B’rith), the funding stopped. 

But not the hatred. It continues in the grand welcome given released Palestinian terrorists, in the naming of squares and streets in memory of suicide bombers, in school textbooks that perpetuate resentment and hatred of Jews, and the incessant refusal to recognize the Jewish connection to holy sites—including the Temple Mount. 

This latest example of incitement didn’t emanate from Hamas, which is a serial delegitimizer, on a daily basis. Zayzafuna is published by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), part of Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority and Israel’s erstwhile partner in negotiations. 

Israel could be expected to insist on a sine qua non of its own: End the incitement against Israel and the Jewish people and start educating young people for peace, or face a refusal to come to the negotiating table. While Israel has the right to demand this, it feels that sitting down for serious talks can’t wait for a potentially generation-long effort to wipe out decades of an untreated virus of hate—assuming, of course, that the Palestinian leadership would even have an interest in doing so. 

And that brings us back to Europe and the settlements. The EU knows that Israel has not broken ground for new settlements in years. It knows that this Israeli administration, as was its predecessor, is committed to dismantling “illegal outposts.” It also knows that in any final agreement, the built-up areas around Jerusalem will most certainly be retained by Israel; Maale Adumim, close to Jerusalem, has nearly 40,000 inhabitants. And the Europeans also know that Israel already dismantled its Gaza settlements in what could be considered a trial run for Palestinian parts of the West Bank. That experiment, as we know, was met with six years of rocket barrages against Israeli cities and towns. 

Beyond vague throwaway lines, I’ve not seen the EU, including its four members who castigated Israel recently at the U.N. Security Council, raise the question of incitement with the Palestinians. They’ve more or less looked the other way. Given the history of the past several centuries, Europeans should realize that unanswered hatred, against Jews but also others, cannot end well. 

Instead of strongly sending that message to the Palestinians, and urging a resumption of talks without preconditions, the EU continues to reinforce a digging in of heels by Abbas and his colleagues in Ramallah. With a few exceptions, most EU member countries continue to squander their credibility on this issue by taking the easy way out: beating up on a friend, instead of talking truth to the recalcitrant party to the conflict.