Bavarian conservatives, who are part of von der Leyen\u2019s conservative European People\u2019s Party (EPP) and govern in an alliance with Merz\u2019s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), say they will stand against the proposals.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnilateral pressure on Israel does not bring peace any closer,\u201d said Hoffmann. \u201cOn the contrary, that is exactly what Hamas wants to achieve. You can criticize friends \u2014 yes, you even have to \u2014 but you cannot sanction friends.\u201d<\/p>\n
Von der Leyen has been under increasing pressure to take a tougher stance on Israel,\u00a0including from inside her own Commission<\/a>. But the reactions to her Israel proposals illustrated the continuing political divide, with some MEPs in the audience applauding while others jeered. Some of the\u00a0harshest criticism<\/a>\u00a0of her proposals came from her own EPP.\u00a0<\/p>\n Divides within Merz\u2019s coalition<\/p>\n The dynamic in Brussels reflects to some extent the political divides inside Merz\u2019s own coalition in Berlin.<\/p>\n Germany has traditionally been one of Israel\u2019s closest allies, but Merz has criticized the Israeli government \u2014\u00a0including its recent attack on Hamas targets in Qatar<\/a> \u2014 in unusually strong terms for a German chancellor. At the same time, his coalition has stopped short of supporting punitive action on the EU level.<\/p>\n Last month, however, Merz announced that Germany would partially suspend weapons deliveries to Israel following its government\u2019s move to\u00a0expand military operations<\/a>\u00a0in Gaza. The chancellor was then confronted with a backlash<\/a>\u00a0from inside his own conservative alliance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bavarian conservatives, who are part of von der Leyen\u2019s conservative European People\u2019s Party (EPP) and govern in an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":10808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[49,2973,4420,170,42,46,8250,2899,43,1823,4321,8253,40,38,41,39,3793,4447],"class_list":["post-10807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-benjamin-netanyahu","tag-foreign-policy","tag-friedrich-merz","tag-germany","tag-headlines","tag-israel","tag-meps","tag-military","tag-news","tag-qatar","tag-sanctions","tag-state-of-the-union","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories","tag-trade","tag-ursula-von-der-leyen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}