The end of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s rule in Hungary is a major domestic political event, but its implications extend beyond Budapest. For the European Union, the transition has foreign-policy consequences, weakening one of the bloc’s biggest obstacles to meaningful action against Israel’s violations of international law.
After Orban’s successor, Peter Magyar, officially took office on May 9 and Hungary dropped its veto, the EU agreed to its first new sanctions package against individual Israeli settlers and organizations since July 2024. Whether Brussels fully uses this opening to shift its policy approach toward Israel, however, will depend on the political will of other key member states.
The end of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s rule in Hungary is a major domestic political event, but its implications extend beyond Budapest. For the European Union, the transition has foreign-policy consequences, weakening one of the bloc’s biggest obstacles to meaningful action against Israel’s violations of international law.
After Orban’s successor, Peter Magyar, officially took office on May 9 and Hungary dropped its veto, the EU agreed to its first new sanctions package against individual Israeli settlers and organizations since July 2024. Whether Brussels fully uses this opening to shift its policy approach toward Israel, however, will depend on the political will of other key member states.
Before the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, the EU was reluctant to impose sanctions on Israel for its occupation of Palestinian territory. The bloc regularly condemned Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and incidents of Israeli abuse against Palestinians, but it failed to translate condemnation into real costs. The closest thing to tangible EU pressure was the implementation of measures requiring that products made in illegal settlements be labeled as such.
That changed after Israel responded to the Oct. 7 attacks with a war in Gaza that the United Nations and leading human rights watchdogs have called a genocide. While the EU continued to tolerate Israel’s offensive, the scale of devastation helped make sanctions over Israeli conduct in the West Bank politically viable within the bloc. In December 2023, EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell proposed sanctions on Israeli actors in the West Bank. By the following April, the EU had agreed to its first-ever economic sanctions in response to violations of Palestinian rights.
Until this week, the EU had formally adopted only two such sanctions packages, in April and July 2024. Those measures targeted a total of nine individual Israeli settlers and five affiliated organizations for their involvement in violence against Palestinians and the proliferation of settlement outposts—issuing travel bans; asset freezes; and broad exclusion from dealings with people affiliated with the EU, its institutions, and its financial system.
Those initial sanctions packages were hardly a display of European leadership. The limited measures targeted low-level actors, not powerful entities that sustain the occupation and settlements, and they only came after the United States and United Kingdom took similar steps.
Because EU foreign-policy decisions typically require unanimity, the bloc could only secure agreement after narrowing the sanction targets and, in the case of the first package, sequencing the measures alongside sanctions on Hamas. This reduced the perceived political risk for member states friendly to Israel, such as Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, and Hungary, which moved from obstructing the packages to abstaining.
In August 2024, Borrell’s proposal to escalate a third sanctions package to include far-right Israeli Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for “hate messages against the Palestinians” was met with reluctance or outright opposition from some EU states. But by early this year, most had acquiesced. Borrell’s successor, Kaja Kallas, said that additional sanctions on settlers had support from all but one member state: Hungary. She called Budapest’s holdout a “tyranny of the single vote.”
With Orban out, that has changed, allowing the third package to move forward after nearly two years. But Hungary’s obstruction was only the most visible barrier to action. A more serious EU sanctions strategy will still depend on whether other European capitals are willing to spend political capital to sustain it.
Orban long aligned himself with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which fit in with his ethno-nationalist defiance of liberal internationalism. He made Hungary into Israel’s most reliable shield in the EU. Under Magyar, Hungary will not suddenly become a champion of Palestinian rights. The new prime minister made it clear that “Hungary will continue to block EU decisions regarding Israel” and suggested a case-by-case approach.
Magyar also signaled a halt to Hungary’s withdrawal from the International Criminal Court and acknowledged the country’s legal obligation to arrest Netanyahu if he enters Hungarian territory. Whether Magyar is willing to unilaterally confront Netanyahu is beside the point on EU sanctions, though. What matters is that a Hungarian government that is seeking to repair relations with Brussels and reestablish itself as a credible European partner is more open to pressure than Orban’s.
That pressure has already produced some movement. Until late April, the EU was stalled on both its 20th sanctions package against Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine and its third sanctions package on Israel.
However, a seeming double standard and hierarchy of urgency remains within the EU: Brussels was reportedly prepared to sanction Israeli businesses over their handling of stolen Ukrainian grain, while Israeli businesses profiting from stolen Palestinian land have yet to face comparable measures. This is a question of credibility. Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank test the same norms against annexation, unlawful force, and unlawful seizure of property that Europe seeks to defend in Ukraine. Weakening norms in one context weakens them in others.
Though the latest EU sanctions package is welcome, particularly because it hits more powerful organizations, it still warrants scrutiny. The inclusion of Regavim, a legal advocacy organization that has used Israeli courts and land-use enforcement systems to target Palestinian construction and advance displacement in occupied territory, is significant: Earlier packages focused mostly on settlers and outpost groups engaged in violence. But the sanctions remain narrowly targeted against settlers rather than addressing the economic architecture sustaining their expansion.
After nearly two years of delay, the EU should be making up for lost time, not merely reviving a sanctions approach that is too limited to meet the scale of the crisis. A serious, goal-oriented EU sanctions regime aimed at delivering long-term peace and stability in Israel-Palestine would require a two-track program focused specifically on countering Israeli abuses, treated as a high-level political priority and supported by a dedicated task force to coordinate sanctions implementation, application, and enforcement.
First, a targeted, list-based sanctions track would allow the EU to keep adding key individuals and entities directly involved in sustaining the occupation of Palestinian territory while expanding the class of targets with each package. This could begin with administrative bodies such as regional councils and move toward real estate firms and any other entities whose commercial activity drives or underpins the settlement enterprise.
A second, broader track would take geographic form, as with the EU’s restrictions on Donetsk and Luhansk—two Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine—that prohibit EU persons from trading with or investing in those areas, with the scope limited to settlement-linked areas of the occupied Palestinian territories. Together, these approaches could disrupt not only the impunity of the settlement enterprise, but also the systems that entrench Israeli control over Palestinian land—without targeting Israel itself.
That distinction matters because it could give EU states that are friendly to Israel a narrower basis to support consequences for specific conduct without requiring them to back broader measures aimed at Israel’s economy or civilian population. Hungary’s acquiescence does not remove every obstacle to meaningful EU action on Israeli conduct that violates international law. A handful of other EU member states have also hesitated over tougher proposals toward Israel, whether out of political alignment or institutional caution.
The task for the EU and the member states that have pushed for stronger action—including Belgium, Ireland, and Spain—is to use this opening from Budapest to keep sanctions on an escalatory track and prevent another country from replacing Hungary as a reliable veto. In practice, that means building coalitions early enough to identify hesitant member states before they can stall or deprioritize additional sanctions measures.
Absent U.S. leadership on sanctions, Europe has a pivotal role to play. The latest package shows that the EU has the potential to create momentum when it is willing to target the institutional machinery that enables dispossession. That step should be the beginning of a broader strategy, not its outer limit. As Israel’s biggest trading partner and the steward of one of the world’s most important currencies, the EU has sanctions leverage that few others can match.
Whether Europe builds a meaningful sanctions regime against Israel will depend on whether Brussels is prepared to act with the resolve required of a bloc that claims a central role in upholding the rules-based order.
