Europe stands at a crossroads as it chooses how to respond to the tragedy in Gaza, weighing the immense cost of Israeli military action against its own ideals of humanitarianism and progress. The proposed sanction—suspending Israeli access to the ambitious Horizon Europe research program—seeks to leverage economic and intellectual cooperation for the sake of influencing policy in the Middle East. The aim, ostensibly, is to remind Israel of its commitments to human rights and proportionality, while retaining a thread of scientific cooperation as a gesture of goodwill. Yet, I cannot help but recoil at the logic that underpins such measures.

Once again, we see the perilous impulse to turn political and moral disagreement into the selective withdrawal of economic and scientific freedoms. The spirit of Horizon Europe is built on openness, innovation, and the free exchange of ideas. When access to those resources becomes a tool for the punishment of nations, we undermine not only the productive forces that drive civilization forward, but also the principle that science and discovery transcend politics. If European powers are willing to punish even their partners in creative endeavor, where does this impulse stop? Will the threat of funding withdrawal one day become a routine weapon in every international quarrel? At what cost to humanity’s collective progress?

The tragedy of Gaza is profound, and the suffering there undeniable. But to withhold the very tools of discovery and cooperation through which nations might solve the problems of war and poverty is to act with the same short-sightedness that so often afflicts bureaucracy. In the end, targeted sanctions such as these do not merely hit the state; they stifle private entrepreneurship, discourage open collaboration, and send a chilling message to intellectuals at home and abroad.

It is not through greater central control, or through the politicized withholding of opportunity, that peace and justice are achieved. It is through the preservation of free association and the encouragement of enterprise and diplomacy between individuals, not collectives. Europe risks betraying its own ideals by sacrificing open scientific engagement on the altar of politics. If we are truly to create a more humane world, let us start not by tightening the grip of coercion, but by loosening it—by trusting in the spontaneous order and mutual benefit that free and open cooperation can create, even across bitter divides.