Earlier this week, a senior Israeli politician returned from a visit to Germany disturbed by what he had encountered there. What concerned him was the extent of the aversion that his hosts displayed whenever the topic of the settlements came up. The man, whose resume includes quite a few visits to European capitals over the past few years, was amazed to discover that unlike on his previous visits, the people he met with, including parliamentarians and senior foreign ministry officials, had zero tolerance for anything to do with the settlements. “I felt like they no longer paid attention at all, when we talked about the settlements. Until recently we still had someone to talk to. They tried to understand our side, and they were very tolerant, but this time I felt like they were trying to tell me, ‘We’re fed up with you. We’ve lost our patience. We don’t believe that you want a diplomatic process.’ And that was the Germans, who are considered to be our closest friends in Europe.”

This description explains statements by sources in the European Union, published Tuesday, Dec. 3, asserting that half the EU member states support labeling products manufactured in the settlements. They want to do this as a result of the sorry state of the negotiations with the Palestinians and on the eve of yet another visit to the region by US Secretary of State John Kerry.

The senior politician says that he was not surprised at all [by the report]: “This was the Europeans’ way of telling us, ‘You’ll understand it the hard way when we hurt you economically and when we stop funding all sorts of projects in the settlements.’ It will end with a boycott imposed on the entire land of Israel. But people here don’t fully understand the depth of the trouble we’re in. Here [Minister of Housing and Construction] Uri Ariel is not afraid to approve building programs in the settlements right in the middle of the diplomatic negotiations, to cause Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu problems on the diplomatic front, and yet still keep his job. What the Europeans take away from that is that Bibi isn’t serious and that nothing will come out of these negotiations. That is why they are trying to apply pressure.”

And so, even though the diplomatic and local significance of these reports are disconcerting, in Israel they were received with something bordering on apathy, if not disdain, as evidenced by comments made by Gilad Erda, minister of home front defense and a member of the diplomatic-security Cabinet. In a morning interview with Army Radio (Galei Tzahal) on Tuesday, Dec. 4, Erdan attacked the European Union: “It is very sad that these are the positions coming out of the EU. It shows their lack of understanding regarding what is happening in the Middle East. Marking these products will only encourage the Palestinians to toughen their positions even more during the negotiations.”