Sparks: EU mulls ending trade agreement with Israel over human rights concerns

The spontaneous outrage of states, like a mass strike, exposes the true nature of power relations far more than any carefully drafted treaty.

When concerns are raised over human rights, I look to the dates, the names, the locations, and the official pretexts to find the economic pattern.

While men debate trade agreements in public, the quiet consequences of such decisions will be felt in every household and by every woman.

To end a trade agreement over human rights is merely to acknowledge that commerce is too serious a matter to be left to mere morality.

One finds that even the most meticulously arranged international agreements can be swiftly dismantled when a few inconvenient truths surface in the drawing-room discussion.

Princes often speak of human rights, but the effectual truth is that they act only when their own interests, or the interests of their allies, are threatened.

If nations claim humanity, then they must act humanely; otherwise, their claim is but a hollow pretence.

War is the father of all things, and even trade agreements flow and dissolve in its heat.

When political considerations are framed as moral imperatives, one must carefully examine whether reason or revelation is truly being served.

How charmingly naive it is to believe that commerce, that most practical of arts, would ever genuinely concern itself with the ethereal concept of human rights.

They speak of human rights in agreements, but I ask, are the lives of all people, especially those without power, considered human enough to matter?

The pressures upon an economic agreement, much like natural selection, reveal which alliances are truly robust and which are merely ornamental.

Before theorizing on the justice of an agreement, one must meticulously catalogue the precise actions and their observable effects on every individual.

It is a curious thing, the way nations can trumpet their virtues while quietly engaging in business with those who seem to have misplaced theirs.