Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman last week summoned ambassadors from European powers to rebuke them for what he described as “one-sided” policies against the Jewish state, potentially renewing long-simmering controversies over the E.U.’s efforts to balance even-handed diplomacy in the Middle East with what even European leaders acknowledge is a diplomatic double-standard applied to Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu echoed the evaluation in a talk with journalists, blasting in particular European Union silence regarding Palestinian incitement.

You know, the EU called EU ambassadors, our ambassadors to the EU are now called in because of this, the construction of a few houses. When did the EU call in the Palestinian ambassadors to complain about the incitement that calls for Israel’s destruction? When did the Palestinian get called in to hear complaints about the fact that security officers in the Palestinian Security Forces are participating in terrorist attacks against innocent Israelis. I think it’s time to stop this hypocrisy.

The moves came a day after Israeli ambassadors in several European countries were summoned to receive lectures on Israeli construction beyond the Jewish state’s 1949 armistice lines. European leaders insist that the vociferous criticism they often aim at Israel is grounded in concerns over Israeli settlement policies, an explanation that observers – including a group of European and global leaders drawn from political, military, intellectual, and activist circles – have evaluated as a pretext for “discriminatory polic[ies] directed exclusively against Israel.” Analysts have in particular pointed to fairly explicit contradictions in the E.U.’s stances toward Israeli universities vs. Northern Cypriot universities and, more recently, to the difficulty that the E.U. faces in explaining away a recent Western Sahara fishing rights deal involving Morocco.

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