1 January 2004 LEARNING THE LESSONS OF THE EUROPEAN UNION'S FAILED MIDDLE EAST POLICIES Gerald M. Steinberg • The European Union's massive investments (financial and political) in Middle East peace efforts in the past three decades have failed to produce positive outcomes. • Relations between Israel and Europe, as reflected in official channels and public opinion polls, reflect unprecedented hostility. From the Israeli perspective, European political officials, NGOs, journalists, and academics are perceived as contributing to the demonization of Israel and Jewish sovereignty. • The dominant European intellectual and political frameworks reflect a simplistic effort to impose Europe's experience in conflict resolution onto the Middle East, without examining fundamental differences in history and conditions. The results are counterproductive. • The evidence indicates that European academics, journalists, and diplomats have generally adopted the Palestinian narrative, focusing on post-1967 symptoms such as "settlements," and ignoring the core factor of Arab rejectionism of Israeli sovereignty. • In order to learn from this experience and make the necessary changes towards a more realistic policy, Europe's academic and diplomatic communities must first examine and debate the underlying assumptions of their Middle East policies. The European Union's policies towards Israel, Middle East peace efforts, and the broader Barcelona/Euromed framework have produced very few - if any - successes in the past three decades. On the contrary, the evidence demonstrates that the EU's approaches and initiatives suffer from a lack of credibility, and relations with Israel are marked by sharp political and ideological confrontation, and boycotts. In a public opinion poll conducted by the EU in 2003, 59 percent of respondents chose Israel as a "threat to world peace," ahead of Syria, Iran, Libya, and North Korea, and reflecting factors that go far beyond disagreements on policy issues. 1 When examined from a realist perspective of individual national or collective European interests, to the degree that these are defined, this history of failure is striking. Stability in the region has not been furthered by these policies, and European power and influence in the