The European Union has taken two recent actions affecting Israel and the Middle East. At best, they give mixed signals to the parties to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; at worst, they undermine U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s painstaking efforts to restart the process this week in Washington.

Last Monday in Brussels, the European Union ministers, after months of debate, agreed to add the military wing of Hezbollah to the EU’s official list of terrorist organizations, but will maintain contact with the Lebanese Shiite group’s “political leaders.” According to a Wall Street Journal story last week, the decision came a year after a Bulgarian bomb attack was linked to Hezbollah, leading to Israeli and U.S. officials calling on Europe to officially blacklist the organization. The article quotes German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle as saying, “This is a signal to terrorist organizations—if you attack one of our European countries, you get an answer from all of them.” 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the EU action, as did Kerry, who commented, “This designation will have a significant impact on Hezbollah’s ability to operate freely in Europe by enabling European law enforcement agencies to crack down on Hezbollah’s fund-raising, logistical activity and terrorist plotting on European soil.” 

The EU action, while positive, could have gone farther, as it did not stretch to Hezbollah’s so-called “political” wing and operations. This is a strange distinction considering the group’s history, which includes the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, which killed almost 100 people, and attacking Israel without provocation in 2006. More recently, Hezbollah has sent thousands of heavily armed terrorists into Syria, where their fighting in support of the genocidal regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad has turned the two-year civil war in Syria in Assad’s favor.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah criticized the EU decision to blacklist his organization’s military wing as a terrorist group, saying the move gave Israel “legal cover” to wage war against Lebanon. Nasrallah accused the EU of “bowing down” to the United States, which has long listed Hezbollah as a terrorist group, and added that the move was “against Europe’s interests.”

While the EU acted constructively in reaching this decision, it was way off base with a second recent action. The EU ministers announced a resolution urging all member states not to purchase any products from Israel which are in whole or part produced beyond Israel’s 1967 borders. This was an effort to create a de facto boycott of goods created in the settlement blocs.

This resolution, coming just as Kerry was awaiting Israeli and Palestinian delegations in Washington, is both substantively and politically incorrect. The so-called 1967 borders do not represent a definition of sovereign boundaries between Israel and a Palestinian state; such a state does not yet exist, and both parties agreed in the Oslo Accords in 1993 that the boundaries could only be finalized through direct negotiations.

The politics of such a decision are also misguided, and notably one sided, as the boundaries are but one significant issue among many in a process of creating peace. To cite just one example, the EU did not focus on Palestinian education practices of teaching hatred of Jews and Israelis in their schools, or on public pronouncements making heroes of suicide bombers. A serious effort at pushing a political solution would not single out a sole factor of dispute among the parties.

By speaking out against terrorist Hezbollah, the EU got it right. By taking sides in the Palestinians’ favor and at the expense of Israel on the very eve of the new talks, the EU got it wrong, and is severely undermining the chances for diplomatic success. 

The EU, along with the United Nations, Russia and the United States make up the official “Quartet” of parties responsible for supporting the Israel-Palestinian peace process. The EU spoke up against terrorism, which is helpful, but then undermined the peace process by attempting to force a result on one of the major aspects of the negotiations, to the clear political detriment of one of the parties. This is not a recipe for diplomatic success.