Last week the European Union issued special guidelines for labeling products produced by Israeli-owned businesses and farms in areas that came under Israeli control in 1967. The guidelines stipulate that fresh fruit and vegetables, wine, honey, olive oil, eggs, poultry, organic products, and cosmetics produced beyond the so-called Green Line must be identified as “Israeli Settlement” products.
Saeb Erekat, secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization, welcomed the new rules, saying that businesses based in settlements “make products with stolen natural resources on the land of the Palestinian people. Those products should not only be labeled, but should be banned.”
There is nothing surprising in Erekat’s position. But the new EU labeling rule perplexes. It is not just that the EU has of late latched on to the odious BDS movement but that the new rules actually fly in the face of the EU’s own labeling policies.
The EU justifies the special labeling as necessary in order to inform consumers that it does not regard the territories “as part of Israel.” Yet as international law professor Eugene Kontorovich has written, EU legal precedent is that special labeling is not required for consumer protection or “to reflect the European Union’s view of the underlying sovereign status of territories.”
Accordingly, “the European Union allows Morocco – which…has occupied Western Sahara since 1975, and populated it heavily with settlers – to export products from its occupied territory labeled ‘Made in Morocco.’ ” The EU itself insists that the made in Morocco label is not misleading.
There are many similar examples noted by Danielle Pletka on the American Enterprise Institute’s AEIdeas blog. They include South Korean-occupied Korea, Mongolian-occupied Mongolia, UK-occupied Falklands, UK-occupied Gibraltar, Chinese-occupied Tibet, and Russian-occupied Crimea. None of these, along with other “occupations” she cites, have drawn special labeling rules. The EU is fooling no one.