Europe and the Question of Palestine

This paper addresses the following set of questions: how do the recent European measures against the settlements accord with previous European policies towards the Palestinians? In what theoretical framework could we place them? What exactly are they? The objective here is to bridge the gap in existing literature by contextualizing those European measures within the particularity of official European policies towards “the question of Palestine” since the early 1970s - not within the European policies towards the Middle East as a region, nor within European regionbuilding efforts. More specifically, this paper contributes a case study on the “normative power” of the EU, and illustrates how international law has made the official European approach to the subject at hand, "the question of Palestine," marked by a high degree of consistency and endurance over the past four decades.