Pakistan, May 12 -- European foreign ministers have finally done what much of the West has spent years avoiding: they have admitted, however cautiously, that settler violence is not an unfortunate excess at the edge of Israeli policy, but one of its working instruments.

The EU's new sanctions target three Israeli settlers and four settler organisations accused of terrorising Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. The decision had been blocked for months by Hungary's previous government. Kaja Kallas, the EU's foreign policy chief, said it was time to move from "deadlock to delivery" and that extremism and violence must carry consequences. Israel's foreign minister responded with the familiar outrage, accusing Brussels of drawing a false ...