Toner expanded upon this brilliant analysis: “The EU has made clear that measures are not a boycott, and the EU has also made very clear that they oppose boycotts against Israel. EU guidelines for products that are sold in EU countries are for the EU to determine.”
Really, these new guidelines aren’t anything new, Toner claimed, it is just a clarification of existing European regulations. It isn’t a “new measure.”
Except that it is a new measure. The EU’s step is far from a clarification. Indeed, it is an obfuscation of the truth. If the concern was that products be labeled to reflect accurate geographic designations, how could a label stating something is a product of “Palestine” possibly be acceptable when no nation called Palestine exists?
This labeling initiative is just a tiny skip away from being a full-blown boycott. In fact, of course, what’s really going on is the EU’s mandate that products be identified by the ethnicity of their producers, not the geographic location of the source: that’s why products made by Arabs in the West Bank can say they’re from the West Bank; but products made in the same place by Jews cannot say they’re made in the same place: they must instead say something else. So it’s simply ethnic discrimination, not geographic disclosure.
But the State Department refuses to understand (or at least to acknowledge) what’s really going on. Instead we get this: “These are technical guidelines delineating the origin of products. Consumers will then be aware of the origin of a product when purchasing it, as they are made aware for products across the globe.”
Although Europe is Israel’s largest importer of goods, only two percent of the goods it exports will be covered by these labeling guidelines. But that two percent includes a huge percentage of employed Arab workers. The Israeli Prime Minister said that his country’s economy is strong enough to weather this effort, but that it will be the Arab workers in Judea and Samaria who will be hurt. Once again an initiative even secretly cloaked as pro-Arab is really far worse, it is simply anti-Israel.
What a coincidence that the labeling initiatives comes just after the anniversary of Kristallnacht. This effort by Europe “brings back dark memories,” Netanyahu said.
And, as the Prime Minister intoned, “האיחוד האירופי צריך להתבייש” “Europe should be ashamed.”