Europe distinguishes Iranians from Iran. Why not Israelis from Israel? - opinion

Europe knows how to condemn a government without condemning everyone it governs.

When Iranians take to the streets, European leaders do not tell them they are responsible for the Islamic Republic. They condemn the regime and express solidarity with the protesters. Europe sanctions North Korea while speaking of North Koreans as victims of repression. It condemns Hezbollah without pretending that Lebanon and Hezbollah are the same thing.

The distinction has been particularly clear in the Palestinian case. After the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led massacres in Israel, the European Union (EU) repeatedly separated Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and the Palestinian people. Josep Borrell, then the EU’s foreign policy chief, warned against collective punishment and reminded Europeans that “not all the Palestinian people are terrorists.”

Russia complicates the picture. Even before the invasion of Ukraine, the European Parliament distinguished “between the Russian people and President Putin’s regime.” After the invasion, ordinary Russians faced visa restrictions and exclusions from sports and culture. Still, European leaders continued to talk about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war and Putin’s regime.

None of these comparisons is exact. Iran, Russia, and North Korea are authoritarian states. Hezbollah is a terrorist organization whose weapons answer to no electorate. Hamas won Palestinian elections in 2006 and has not faced voters in two decades.

Israel is different. It is a democracy. Israelis choose their governments.

And this is where things get uncomfortable

Across parts of Europe, Israeli universities are treated as extensions of the state. Israeli artists and cultural institutions face calls for exclusion. Broadcasters withdrew from the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest because Israel’s public broadcaster, KAN, was taking part. There is growing pressure to keep Israeli athletes out of international competitions.

Official Europe is more careful. When European Council President António Costa supported proposed measures against Israel in September 2025, he stressed that they were “not aimed at the Israeli people,” but were a response to the government’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.

Outside Brussels, that distinction is less secure. In debates over universities, culture, broadcasting, and sports, the categories slide into one another. The Israeli government becomes Israel. Israel becomes its institutions. Its institutions become its citizens.

Why? The obvious answer is democracy.

ISRAELIS VOTE, pay taxes, and elect the politicians who govern them. Many serve in the military. Perhaps Europeans are, therefore, entitled to hold Israelis responsible in a way they would hesitate to hold Iranians responsible for the ayatollahs.

There is something to that argument. Israelis cannot have democracy both ways. We cannot celebrate democratic choice when it produces governments we like, and then pretend that governments we dislike have nothing to do with the society that elected them. The death, displacement, and destruction in Gaza resulted from decisions made by an elected Israeli government. European anger at Israel did not come from nowhere.

But there is a long distance between political responsibility and collective guilt.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the judicial overhaul. Israelis have demonstrated for the hostages and demanded accountability for October 7. Israel’s research universities went on strike against the judicial overhaul in 2023. Supporting a war does not mean supporting everything done in its course.

And what about the roughly one-fifth of Israeli citizens who are Arab, many among the government’s strongest critics? If responsibility follows automatically from an Israeli passport, where do they fit?

Citizens in a democracy have a relationship with state power. But they are not the state.

Still, democracy is not the whole explanation. Israel occupies a peculiar place in the European imagination. It is not European, but neither does it feel entirely foreign.

Much of its early political leadership came from Europe. Its universities, political parties, trade unions, legal traditions, and public culture were deeply influenced by European ideas. The Holocaust sits at the heart of both Israeli political memory and Europe’s understanding of its postwar self. Israel participates extensively in European research, culture, trade, and sports.

That closeness does not always work in Israel’s favor.

When many Europeans look at Israel’s rule over Palestinians, they see things they recognize from their own history: a powerful state ruling another people, settlements, contested land, and a profound imbalance of power. Much of the language now used to describe Israel comes from Europe’s arguments about its past: colonialism, occupation, settler colonialism.

Europe spent centuries ruling other peoples, building settlements, drawing borders, and calling domination civilization. Much of postwar Europe was built around the determination not to be that Europe anymore.

Israel, therefore, does something unusual. It does not confront Europe only with the Middle East. It confronts Europe with Europe.

Perhaps that is part of what makes Israel so difficult for Europeans to discuss. It is familiar enough to be judged by European standards, yet different enough to carry meanings beyond the country itself. Arguments about Israel become arguments about colonialism, nationalism, war, memory, and Europe’s own past.

The settler-colonial argument takes this further. If the problem is understood not as the policy of one government but as something built into Israeli society itself, the Israeli citizen becomes part of the structure being condemned. The distinction between government and people begins to disappear.

THIS DID NOT begin with Gaza. Before October 7, an EU Agency for Fundamental Rights survey found that 75% of Jewish respondents felt people held them responsible for the Israeli government’s actions because they were Jewish. The war did not invent this tendency. It intensified it.

Government becomes country. Country becomes citizens. Citizens become Jews.

Yet democracy should push us in the opposite direction. Elections create responsibility, but they also reveal disagreement. A democracy contains those who voted for the government and those who voted against it, majorities and minorities, supporters and protesters.

None of this means Israel should be shielded from criticism. Israeli governments should answer for their decisions. Israeli institutions should be judged for what they do. Israelis who commit crimes should be held responsible.

But responsibility should be attached to conduct.

That should also guide European decisions about “Horizon Europe,” cultural programs, universities, and artists. If an Israeli institution is complicit in wrongdoing, make the case and act accordingly. If an individual has done something that warrants exclusion, demonstrate it. Nationality itself should not become the evidence.

And Israelis cannot demand this distinction only for themselves.

Palestinians are not Hamas. Criticism of Israeli policy is not necessarily hostility toward Israel. Hostility toward Israel is not automatically antisemitism. If we insist that Europeans distinguish between Israel and Israelis, we must be equally serious about distinguishing between Palestinians and those who claim to act in their name.

Otherwise, this is not a principle. It is simply an argument we use when it suits us.

Europe knows how to make these distinctions, imperfectly but deliberately.

It should be able to make them with Israel too.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and a professor of European studies and international relations in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.