The European Union is now requiring that Israeli products made in contested territories – the West Bank – must carry consumer warning labels, a decision that could trigger American anti-boycott laws and open up what legal experts describe as a “Pandora’s box” of litigation.
The story is here:
The European Union ‘s top court ruled Tuesday that EU countries must identify products made in Israeli settlements on their labels, in a decision that was welcomed by rights groups but sparked anger in Israel.
The European Court of Justice said that when products come from an Israeli settlement, their labels must provide an “indication of that provenance” so that consumers can make “informed choices” when they shop.
The EU rejects Israeli settlement expansion, saying it undermines the hopes for a two-state solution by gobbling up lands claimed by the Palestinians. Israel says the labeling is unfair and discriminatory and says other countries involved in disputes over land are not similarly sanctioned.
The volume of settlement goods coming into Europe, including olive oil, fruit and wine but also industrial products, is relatively small compared to the political significance of the court ruling. It is estimated to affect about 1% of imports from Israel, which amount to about 15 billion euros ($16.5 billion) a year.
The EU wants any produce made in the settlements to be easily identifiable to shoppers and insists that it must not carry the generic “Made in Israel” tag.
Another story has this:
“I am not a psychologist, so I can’t tell you what the motives are behind Europe’s targeting of Jewish-owned businesses. Perhaps it is anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head again, perhaps it is blind ignorance, or even a desire to do the right thing,” Yaakov Berg, CEO of the Psagot winery, told the Free Beacon. “Regardless, the application of the current EU trade directive to label goods from Jewish producers, and only Jewish producers in the West Bank is discriminatory and illegal.”
Berg maintains that Jewish businesses should not be penalized for policies enacted by the Israeli government that European leaders object to.
“We are not the Israeli government,” he said. “Psagot winery is not responsible for Israeli government policy. But because we are Jewish owners of a winery in a beautiful and hotly contested land, we are being targeted and punished. And we are being punished precisely because we are Jews living in Judea where we have every right to be, as do the Palestinian Arabs and Druze and the Christians.”
Instead of suggesting that the E.U. is wrong to penalize West Bank businesses for the policies of the Israeli government – does he think that his government should be penalized? – Berg ought to have given a spirited defense of those policies, by reference to the Mandate for Palestine and U.N. Resolution 242. He does say that “we are Jews living in Judea where we have every right to be,” but he ought to have provided more detail, explaining why the West Bank is not a colony, but part of the territory originally assigned to the Mandate for Palestine and thus always intended to be part of the future State of Israel, and why the Jews living in the West Bank should not be described, tendentiously, as “settlers” and “colonists.”
“No one should be discriminated against because of their religion,” Berg said. “If you support a Palestinian state, would you support a Judenrein state of Palestine? That seems to be what the EU is proposing when it says Jewish businesses are illegal in Palestine but Muslim businesses are not, in the same location! Such a de facto boycott of Jewish products, the likes of which we have not seen since Nazi Germany, would definitely run afoul of U.S. law.”
Yohan Benizri, a lawyer representing Psagot, warned that a decision affirming the labels for Jewish-made goods could open the door to other types of overly onerous labeling.
“One doesn’t need legal training to recognize the unintended consequences of the EU adopting a policy of politicized labeling,” Benizri said. “If the EU Court rules that geographic location is not enough, and that EU law mandates every product coming from either a ‘disputed territory’ or a country with ‘objectionable social policies’ be labeled as such, then EU markets will be thrown into chaos.”
“Can you imagine a situation where plastic cups imported from China must be labeled ‘this country has a one-child policy,’ or gas from Russia must be labeled, ‘This is gas from a country that illegally occupies Crimea,’ or products from the United States require the labeling ‘the U.S. engages in capital punishment and is building an illegal border wall?’ Product labels will have become political billboards depending on the whims of EU politicians, and every EU importer will shoulder a liability for not complying with arbitrary labeling laws.”
Why limit labelling goods to Israeli products from the West Bank? What about alerting would-be consumers to what they might find objectionable in other producers? Just imagine: “This orange marmalade comes from a country where riding to hounds is still permitted.” Or “this saffron comes from a country where bullfighting is still allowed.” Or “this pasta comes from a country where the Mafia, Camorra, and ‘Ndrangheta are still tolerated.” Or “this loukoum comes from a country which refuses to recognize the Armenian genocide.” Or “this oil comes from a country whose agents murdered and dismembered Jamal Khashoggi” Or “this vodka was made in Russian-occupied Crimea.” You get the idea. Any number can play. And in the end, very few countries should ‘scape whipping.
But no one cares about any of that. Israel is always the special case, the lone exception that will be subject to sanction. The E.U. Court of Justice, like the E.U. itself, is hopelessly biased against Israel. It sees no reason to be consistent in its labeling demands; no matter what other countries do, it is only Israeli products from the West Bank that are to be given warning labels – “Made in the Occupied West Bank” – that should decrease sales. This is not just economic, but also political warfare, a way to pressure Israel into giving up its claim to the West Bank. Meanwhile, products from the West Bank made by Palestinians will only bear the label “Made in Palestine,” instead of the more informative and truthful “made in a place where terrorists and their families are generously subsidized.”
A State Department spokesman told the Free Beacon that the Trump administration has been clear in its objection to the BDS movement and efforts to single out the Jewish state.
“The State Department is aware of this particular issue,” the official said. “The administration’s position strongly opposing all efforts to boycott, delegitimize, or isolate Israel is well-known.”
What is needed is a clear statement by Israel of its legal claim to the West Bank. The claim goes back to the Mandate for Palestine, and the territory assigned to it by the League of Nations. The term “West Bank” is a toponym first used by the Jordanians after 1949, as a way of avoiding the place names Judea and Samaria, that had been in use in the Western world for several thousand years; they were good enough for Jesus, but not for the Jordanians, because they were too Jewish. When the Jordanians came into possession of this territory, they had no legal claim to it. The superior legal claim – the only such claim –remained with the Jews.
We need to go back to the express provisions of the Mandate for Palestine, and to the territories assigned to it, to understand that legal claim. When the League of Nations set up its system of mandates, several of them were intended to lead to the creation of Arab states – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon. Only one, the Mandate for Palestine, was created for the express purpose of establishing the “Jewish National Home,” which, in time, would give rise to a Jewish state. As the Preamble to the Mandate states:
…the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, [the Balfour Declaration] by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country…
Article 4 of the Mandate for Palestine again mentions the aim of establishing the Jewish national home:
An appropriate Jewish agency shall be recognised as a public body for the purpose of advising and co-operating with the Administration of Palestine in such economic, social and other matters as may affect the establishment of the Jewish national home and the interests of the Jewish population in Palestine, and, subject always to the control of the Administration to assist and take part in the development of the country.
The Zionist organization, so long as its organization and constitution are in the opinion of the Mandatory appropriate, shall be recognised as such agency. It shall take steps in consultation with His Britannic Majesty’s Government to secure the co-operation of all Jews who are willing to assist in the establishment of the Jewish national home.
Article 6 is even more important:
The Administration of Palestine, while ensuring that the rights and position of other sections of the population are not prejudiced, shall facilitate Jewish immigration under suitable conditions and shall encourage, in co-operation with the Jewish agency referred to in Article 4, close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.
“Facilitate Jewish immigration” and “shall encourage…close settlement by Jews on the land.”
Nothing could be clearer. But what about the land assigned to the Mandate for Palestine? That land included – besides other territory — the entire area that we now know as the West Bank. That was the basis for the legal claim of the Jews to that territory. The Mandate was not extinguished when the League of Nations came to an end. Article 80 of the UN Charter, once known unofficially as the Jewish People’s clause, preserved intact all the rights granted to Jews under the Mandate for Palestine, even after the Mandate’s expiry on May 14-15, 1948. Under this provision of international law (the Charter is an international treaty), Jewish rights to Palestine and the Land of Israel were not to be altered in any way unless there had been an intervening trusteeship agreement between the states. And there was no “intervening trusteeship agreement.” The Mandate’s provisions still held.
Israel, however, was unable to enforce its claim until 1967, because Jordan came into possession of the West Bank in the 1948-49 war. legal claim to the West Bank had never been extinguished; the difference was that after the Six-Day War, Israel was now in a position to enforce it. Israel’s claim to the villages and cities established by Jews in the West Bank, to Gilo, Gush Etzion, Maale Adumim, and Kiryat Arba, are just as valid as its claim to Tel Aviv or Haifa or Beersheva.
Israel also has a second, entirely independent claim to hold onto all or part of the West Bank. This claim arises from U.N. Resolution 242, which gave Israel the right, as British U.N. Ambassador Lord Caradon, its chief author, said, to keep territory that it needed in order to have “secure and recognized boundaries.” This gave rise to another formulation used by Israeli leaders: “secure and defensible borders.” Lord Caradon insisted that the Resolution did not require Israeli withdrawal from “all of the territories,” but only from “territories” it had won in the war. When asked about the meaning of Resolution 242, he replied:
I defend the resolution as it stands. What it states, as you know, is first the general principle of inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war. That means that you can’t justify holding onto territory merely because you conquered it. We could have said: well, you go back to the 1967 line. But I know the 1967 line, and it’s a rotten line. You couldn’t have a worse line for a permanent international boundary. It’s where the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948. It’s got no relation to the needs of the situation.
Had we said that you must go back to the 1967 line, which would have resulted if we had specified a retreat from all the occupied territories, we would have been wrong.
When Lord Caradon says that “you can’t justify holding onto territory merely because you conquered it,” that applies not just to Israel, as some believe, but with even greater force to Jordan. Israel’s claim to the West Bank was not “merely” because it had conquered it; the claim rested on the Mandate’s explicit provisions allocating that territory to the future Jewish state. It was Jordan that had a claim “merely” because its forces had taken the West Bank in 1948-49. Note, too, the firmness of Lord Caradon’s dismissal of the 1967 lines as nothing more than “where the troops happened to be on a certain night in 1948,” that is, nothing more than armistice lines, and not internationally recognized borders, as the Arabs have tried to make the world believe.
Israel has, in fact, given up a great deal of territory it won in 1967. In returning the entire Sinai to Egypt, Israel gave up 95% of the territory it had won in the Six-Day War. But Israel never had a claim under the Mandate to the Sinai, nor did it feel it needed to hold onto it in order to obtain “secure and defensible borders.”
The West Bank is different. If Israel were to go back to something approximating the pre-1967 lines, that is, give up control of that territory, including the Jordan Valley and the heights of Judea, it would no longer control the invasion routes from the east. And Israel would once again have at its narrowest post a mere nine-mile wide waist, from Qalqilya to the sea. The country could be cut in two in a matter of hours. Having fought three major wars (1948-49, 1967, 1973) in which it had to fight for its survival, and six minor wars imposed on it, first by the Egyptian fedayeen and then by the terrorist groups Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, embattled Israel has earned the right to determine for itself the conditions of its own security.
The European Court of Justice needs to read, very carefully, the Mandate for Palestine, especially Articles 4 and 6. It needs to study the League of Nations’ maps that show what territories were assigned to that Mandate, to be incorporated into the Jewish national home. It further needs to understand the significance of Article 80 of the U.N. Charter. The European justices need to comprehend the legal status of the West Bank before 1948, its legal status when Jordan possessed it from 1949 to 1967, and its legal status today, when Israel possesses it, and which many people seem confused about. Finally, the E.U. Court of Justice has to comprehend what U.N. Resolution 242 meant in insisting on Israel’s need for “secure and recognized boundaries” and how Jewish settlement of the West Bank promotes that goal.
That’s the way forward. Only thus.
Philis O'Shaughnessy says
I don’t want to tell you details but the EU is junk. you are headed into evil. Going against Israel and that EU will continue into total chaos, death, murder. Embrace islam is satanic.
mortimer says
‘Judea’ is the ancestral homeland of the Jews.
Very good article about the legal basis for Israel’s claim to Judea and Samaria.
mortimer says
Israel will have no option but to duke this one out in court. I think that if the US recognized that the West Bank is part of the Mandate intended for the Jewish homeland, it would start the process of recognizing that Israel has a valid claim for the West Bank. Jordan never had a valid claim to the West Bank and seized it by conquest and annexed it without international authorization. This psycho-drama should be finally ended and the world community should be clear that the two-state solution was created by the partition in 1923 of the Mandate into the Emirate of Trans-Jordan on one side and the Jewish homeland in ‘West Palestine’ (as the British supervisors called it among themselves).
James Lincoln says
mortimer,
Yes, it would be interesting to see what would happen if the courts decide in favor of Israel…
הדר ישראל says
The same day in which rockets and mortars are raining on Israeli civilians from the JUDENREIN territory of the Gaza Strip, the European court has decided that all the products MADE BY JEWS, ONLY THOSE MADE BY JEWS, in Judea, Samaria, Jordan Valley and Golan Heights, must carry a special label to be sold in the EU.
Europe is again showing its true colours by labelling ONLY Jewish products… It’s a 2300 year old habit of Jew-hating, that started in the VI Cent. B.V.E. with the Ancient Greeks saying that Jews prayed to a donkey’s head in their Temple and sacrificed a young Greek boy yearly… and continued elsewhere in Europe with circuses, stakes, ghettoes, gulag and Lager. As Our Prophet Jeremiah said:
הֲיַהֲפֹךְ כּוּשִׁי עוֹרוֹ וְנָמֵר חֲבַרְבֻּרֹתָיו גַּם אַתֶּם תּוּכְלוּ לְהֵיטִיב לִמֻּדֵי הָרֵעַ: יִרְמְיָהוּ יג, כג
“Can a Black person change his skin, or can a leopard change its spots? So will you be able to improve, you who have become accustomed to do evil.” Jeremiah 13:23
gravenimage says
Yes–appalling.
Robert_k says
The European Court of Justice seems to be basing its findings on the Nuremberg Laws.
roger standen says
The ECJ will not follow a word of the sound advice given in the last paragraph. It is not in any way characterised by such truth and integrity. Good try though Hugh. It should be called the ECCM……the European Court of Corruption and Mendacity.
Rarely says
I hope someone on the West Bank discovers a cure for cancer.
WPM says
The labeling of products made in Palestine under the present government would be very short because they make nothing really for export except terrorism ,death ,and human suffering .They are too busy lobbing missiles ,killing women and children in there sleep, teaching there children to hate Jews, Christians, the west, America , Israel, to product any valued products for export. Behavior much like violent panhandlers to the rest of there world expecting to be paid to remain in there own area only if they get money from the west to remain quiet and not export their violence overseas.
observer says
Where has Nikki Haley gone ?
The EU does not speak for me !!!
Ole Pederson says
1938: “Deutsche! Kauft nicht bei Juden” (= Germans, do not buy Jewish goods)
2019: “EU citizens, don’t … ” (deleted)
It is high time this EU collapses under its own immorality (The EU is not Europe!)
gravenimage says
All too apt, Ole.
Leroy says
Sounds like they are producing collectables. Where can a person order a product with an anti-jew label?
Infidel says
I have a simple suggestion for Israeli workers in Judea and Samaria settlements, who make a living by making things to export to Europe:
Manufacture the products wherever they’re currently manufactured
Ship them to Israel – be it Tel Aviv, Netanya, Haifa, Acre….
Package it there
Ship it under ‘Made in Israel’.
Legally, the ‘Made in’ label refers to the country in which the product in question is finally packaged. How else do you think anything could be labeled, given the distributed nature of modern manufacturing?
The EU won’t be able to do a thing about that under international law
Infidel says
Can anybody list which HTML tags work here? I used the listing tags OL and LI above, but they didn’t.
gravenimage says
European Union Mandates Warning Labels on Goods from the West Bank
………………..
More ugly pro-Jihad antisemitism from the EU.
observer says
Yep…
EU uber alles !!!
Immoral idiots.
Angemon says
Good – now I know what products I’m sure to get.
J. Joel Farber says
“Jordan came into possession. . . .” I think it would be more precise to say “Jordan invaded and occupied. . .”