The National Jewish Assembly (NJA) strongly condemns the Financial Times’ publication of Martin Sandbu’s column urging the EU to impose sweeping sanctions on Israel. The piece is not a reasoned policy argument – it is a reckless endorsement of collective punishment against the region’s only liberal democracy, cloaked in bureaucratic euphemism and moral pretence.
Sandbu’s suggestion that sanctioning Israel will somehow “strengthen international law” or set an example for autocratic regimes is as absurd as it is sinister. Hamas is not a state. It is a genocidal terrorist movement, not a signatory to the Geneva Conventions. Yet in this twisted logic, Israel – not Hamas – must be sanctioned in order to “strengthen norms.”
This is not a neutral policy recommendation. It is a textbook case of the anti-Israel obsession that underpins the global BDS campaign: the idea that the world’s only Jewish state must be uniquely sanctioned, boycotted, and delegitimised in ways no other democracy is.
NJA Vice Chairman Laurence Julius said: “Sanctioning Israel is not a principled act. It is a political one – one that elevates Islamist terror groups to the level of sovereign states while punishing a democracy for defending its people. This grotesque reversal of moral responsibility is not only antisemitic in effect – it is corrosive to the very liberal order these writers claim to defend.”
To compare Israel to Russia, as Sandbu does, is not only intellectually dishonest – it is morally bankrupt. Israel did not start this war. It did not seek it. It was forced into it by a barbaric massacre. To then demand it conduct war as if it were policing Switzerland is to deny Israel the very rights of sovereignty every other state possesses.
The NJA urges European policymakers to reject this perverse logic. Sanctioning a democratic ally under siege is not diplomacy – it is surrender. It empowers terrorists, weakens the West, and corrodes the foundations of international law itself.
