The European Union’s Policies in Historic Palestine: Two-Step Securitisation, Differentiation and Its Discontents

Abstract Most analyses of European Union (EU) policies relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict do not question the epistemological framework on which these policies are based. The 1967 paradigm preferred by the EU does not address the inalienable rights of all Palestinians but rather focuses exclusively on a particular group, those Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, territories that have been under Israeli occupation since 1967. This focus ignores (or at most leaves in a second place) the rest of the Palestinian people: both 1948 Palestinians and the Palestinian diaspora, whose rights are part and parcel of the question of Palestine. This article examines how the EU bases its policies on different kinds of securitisation concerning distinct Palestinian communities. It does so through a two-step securitisation process that frequently rubber-stamps Israel’s narrative of securitisation. This compartmentalising program ultimately is complicit with Israel’s ‘divide and rule’ strategy and settler-colonial mechanisms, contributing to the deepening of Palestinian fragmentation. Moreover, it renounces exploring alternative proposals and paradigms that consider the rights of the Palestinian people as a whole and envisages decolonisation as the desired outcome.