Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Avigdor Lieberman on Friday denounced a letter signed by more than a dozen of his European counterparts asking that the EU require products made in Israeli settlements be labeled differently from those made in Israel.
Lieberman said if the EU wanted to differentiate products made in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, it should just stick a yellow star on the products, a pointed reference to the stars that Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe were forced to wear.
The letter, signed by 16 foreign ministers, urged EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Federica Mogherini to clearly distinguish products sold in the EU that are made in Israel from those made in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. It is similar to another letter, sent in 2013, by 13 members of the EU to Mogherini’s predecessor.
“I have a recommendation for them,” Lieberman told Israel Radio. “They can take a yellow badge and mark all the products from Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights with a yellow badge,” he said, using the Biblical names for the West Bank and the mountainous plateau that Israel seized from Syria during the 1967 war.
The letter, which was sent on Monday, days before Israel’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust, was first reported on Friday by Israeli daily Haaretz.
Lieberman described the letter’s timing as “miserable.”
The letter described the Israeli settlements as illegal and said their expansion affected the possibility of preserving a two-state solution, in which a Palestinian state could be established alongside Israel.
“The continued expansion of Israeli illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, and other territories occupied by Israel since 1967, threatens the prospect of a just and final peace agreement,” the letter said.
The foreign ministers said that specific labeling was needed to ensure that “consumers are not being misled by false information.”
An Israeli official said that the nation did not expect the EU to move forward on labeling settlement products, a move that has been discussed since 2012, at least not before a new Israeli government is formed.
The letter appeared to be timed to serve as a warning to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he form a governing coalition that would not pursue peace negotiations with Palestinians.
It did not appear to suggest any immediate shift in EU policy.
Rights groups and Palestinian advocates have long pointed to Jewish settlement products sold in Europe, mostly agricultural goods that are labeled made in Israel, as an example of how Israel has sought to normalize the communities and industries it has built in the West Bank.
The letter marked the second time European foreign ministers urged their foreign policy chief to label goods made in Israeli settlements. Three of the signatories — Britain, Ireland and Belgium — now make a distinction in their labeling.
Germany did not sign the letter, and the issue of labeling goods from Israel is not on the agenda for a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg tomorrow.
EU Foreign Affairs Department spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic played down the issue as “not new.”
She said that the law already mandated clear place-of-origin labeling and that work had been under way for some time to put this into effect.
Shawan Jabarin, director of al-Haq, a Palestinian rights group that has lobbied European countries to ban Israeli settlement products, said the letter was a small “positive step.”
“Our message to the Europeans is that labeling has to lead to banning,” Jabarin said. “Without a ban, it’s empty talk. Why are you labeling it? For what? Is it just to tell the customers that this is stolen products, but you can buy it?”
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