Moderate vs radical: Lobbying on EU trade and development policy towards Israel/Palestine

This paper analyses the interactions between ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ actors and their discourses in the case of EU foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine. European politicians, civil society groups and other stakeholders have held divergent views on how the Middle East conflict could or should be solved. While some have advocated a so-called ‘radical’ agenda by promoting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, others have engaged in more technical and ‘moderate’ discourses. In this paper we examine the positions of pro-Palestinian interest groups in relation to two cases that concern EU trade and development policy respectively: labelling (2009-2021) and textbooks (2019-2023). While the former concerns the issue of labelling/banning trade imports from Israeli settlements, the latter concerns EU development aid to Palestine’s education sector. Specifically, we analyse how the temporal dimension (short-term and long-term impact), the external context (favourable and unfavourable), and the type of lobby topic (active versus reactive) matters for the moderate- radical interaction. Based on analysis of documents and semi-structured interviews, we find that while the radical flank initially strengthened the moderates in the case of labelling, this has proved to be a Pyrrhic victory in the longer term due to the relatively weak implementation of this measure and an increased call for more radical measures such as a trade ban. In contrast, the moderate flank has arguably strengthened the radical flank in the case of textbooks, preventing the latter from engaging in debates outside its core struggles. In doing so, we aim to contribute to the literature on EU external relations, on EU-Israel-Palestine relations and on the radical flank effect. The paper will also generate wider insights on the potential relevance of so-called radical and heterodox perspectives on European politics.