The EU Court of Injustice

The European Union ruled that produce and products from Jewish-owned businesses and farms located in the West Bank must be labeled “Settlement Products.” The EU states that it does not support the BDS movement, because it is not calling for a boycott of Jewish products, it calls for labeling products so consumers can boycott these products. Does anyone else see the parallel here between labeling Jewish products and when the Nazis painted Jewish stars on store windows foreshadowing the Kristallnacht catastrophe? Then it was just one country; what makes this all the more disturbing is that the law imposes its racist requirement on all 28 EU members.

 The ruling displays ignorance of history. The EU calls Israeli factories and farms, many employing Arabs, as alien to land designated for Jewish settlement under the 1920 San Remo agreement, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. These lands were then incorporated into the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which again designated them for the Jewish inhabitants who lived there continuously for thousands of years until the Jordanians attacked and either killed the inhabitants or drove them out. Although captured by Jordan in 1948, it was reclaimed just nineteen years later. No one, not even Jordan, claims this land belongs to Jordan, nor was there ever a movement to make this an independent Arab state until much later. Remember that it was Nasser, the President of Egypt, along with the KGB, who created the Palestinian Liberation Organization years before the 1967 war. The object was not the liberation of Judea and Samaria from Jordan. It was the destruction of Israel.

 The same Oslo Accords that gave the PLO official control of the Palestinian Authority divided the areas reclaimed from Jordan into three zones. Because Israel took back land that belonged to them, the Oslo Accords meant Israel gave up control over most of the territory it reclaimed. For those areas which the PA administers, which includes over 90% of the Arab inhabitants, Israel has no direct control. If there is a hostile occupation, it is due to the PA, not Israel. I invite you to visit these areas to see that there are PA police, PA judges, Pa everything. There is no sign of Israel unless there is an act of war.

 Areas that Israel administers by this bilateral agreement is not occupied by an outside entity, as the world “occupied” implies. This land was always part of Israel. When the United States says it no longer will subscribe to the notion that this is an illegal occupation, it recognizes that a country cannot illegally occupy land that was always theirs. Nevertheless, Israel handed most of the area to the PA as it does not wish to control people who do not want to be governed by Israel. But as for products that come from the zone everyone agreed Israel would administer, how is this land “occupied?” How are these “settlements”? The only reason why Jews had to move back into these areas was that the Jordanians expelled or murdered them. Not recognizing their rights to live in areas administered by Israel gives legal recognition to genocide and population expulsion by an invading country, because that is what happened.

 If the EU means to help Palestinian Arabs, this is a wrong way of going about this. The law punishes Arab workers who want nothing more than to receive higher wages and better working conditions. The Sodastream factory, for example, employed 500 Palestinian Arabs before it was targeted for boycott. Under the EU rule, SodaStream bottles would have to wear the yellow star of Jewishness, except it already closed its West Bank factory, reopening inside Israel. The new plant increased its workforce to 1500, mostly Bedouin, workers. Had this happened at its original location, the income from these workers would have lifted whole communities. Soda steam was just one factory giving opportunities to Arab workers. How much more hope does the EU wish to crush in this region?

 Is there a moral principle somewhere in all this? If the EU wants to champion human rights, then when will it label products from the Islamic Republic of Iran, the killer of its own people, the largest exporter of terror, and the cruelest violator of women's rights in the world? Will the EU insist on labels on clothing produced by Palestinian workers trapped and exploited in UN refugee camps inside Jordan? Will Europe require goods from Turkey to bear labels now that it has launched a genocide against the Kurdish people and unleashed ISIS back into the world?

 Of course not. These countries have no Jews.

 What is really at stake? The EU gave in to demands from people who don’t care about Palestinians. The groups that push for labels do so because they want to crush the one tiny Jewish state. Once they do that, they will turn next to Greece, Spain, even the countries in the Middle East — Jordan, Iraq, Syria: you’re next —because they are driven to create an Islamic empire, be it governed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Iran, or Turkey. The Europeans just gave the bad guys another victory. Think about what you are doing before it is too late to support freedom over tyranny.