Doubt over EU readiness to act on its resolutions against settlement products

Articles from Times of Israel, MEMO and EuroPal Forum

France’s Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius (R) is welcomed by Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki upon Fabius’ arrival in Ramallah on Sunday, June 21st, 2015. France is under ‘intense pressure’ to drop its decision to refer the urgency of reaching a two-state soltion to the UNSC. Photo by Mohamad Torokman/ Reuters

EU envoy warns of new sanctions against settlements

Official says there are ‘more tools’ Europe can use to protest Israel’s continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank

By AP and Elhanan Miller, Times of Israel
August 27, 2015

The European Union’s outgoing envoy to the Palestinian territories says the 28-nation bloc is moving forward with measures against Jewish West Bank settlements.

 The envoy, John Gatt-Rutter, [L] did not provide a time frame. But his remarks to reporters on Thursday [August 27th] underline European discontent with Israel’s continued expansion of settlements in territory that Palestinians want for a future state.

“There is support within the union to go on,” Gatt-Rutter said, adding that there are “more tools” the EU can use.

The EU, Israel’s biggest trading partner, is exploring guidelines that would require Israel to label settlement products. It already bars goods produced in settlements from receiving customs exemptions given to Israeli goods.

Gatt-Rutter’s remarks come as a grassroots movement promoting boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel is gaining steam and as the Palestinian Authority urged the EU to block the entry of Israelis living beyond the Green Line [i.e. settlers] into Europe’s 26 Schengen Area countries.

In an extensive interview with London-based newspaper Asharq al-Awsat earlier this week, PA Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki expressed annoyance at the fact that a European Union decision to label settlement products has not yet been implemented.

“If the EU argues that settlement products should be ‘discriminated against,’ settlers are among those products and should be viewed the same way,” Maliki told the daily. The PA has also called on the EU and US to place settlers that carry out so-called “price tag” attacks against Palestinian property on their terror blacklist.

The European Union was looking into the possibility of blacklisting “violent settlers” late last year, diplomats told Reuters. That sanction would affect up to 200 individuals, they estimated.

Schengen Area countries, comprising most of Western Europe, have abolished passports and other forms of border control at their common borders.

A sign in the Tesco Metro store in Kensington High Street, London, indicates that goods – Tesco Family Mixed Peppers – understood to be Israeli settlement produce have been removed. Photo by Mark Kerrison, Demotix

Settlements lose $6bn in two years of European boycott

By MEMO
June 15, 2015

The European boycott campaign against the Israeli settlements’ agricultural products caused Israel’s economy a loss $6 billion in the years 2013 and 2014.

According to the data of the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, obtained by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the losses resulting from the boycott will rise to $9.5 billion by the end of this year.

The paper said that Israel is trying to compensate for these losses through increasing Israeli exports to the United States, as well as increasing US investments in Tel Aviv. MEMO

PA: EU should ban Israeli settlers, products

By EuroPal Forum
August 24, 2015

The Palestinian Authority says that the European Union should block access to Israeli settlers and their products.

PA Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki told Saudi Arabia’s London-based newspaper Asharq al-Awsat on Sunday that now is the time to pressure Israel to halt its illegal settlements.

“If the EU argues that settlement products should be ‘discriminated against,’ settlers are among those products and should be viewed the same way,” Maliki told the daily.

He also called on the EU and US to place settlers that carry out so-called “price tag” attacks against Palestinian property on their blacklist.

Price tag attacks are acts of vandalism and violence regularly launched by Israelis against Palestinians and their properties as well as Islamic holy sites in Palestine.

Maliki’s comments came as the EU was reportedly getting ready, in an unprecedented move, to blacklist up to 200 Israeli settlers.

His comments also come after meeting French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius in the French capital Paris.

France, the Palestinian foreign minister argued, was leading an international movement with a so-called peace plan that would see a solution based on the 1967 borders. Reportedly, if Tel Aviv does not abide by the international demands, Paris would take the issue to the UN Security Council for actions against Israel. He added that Paris had been subjected to intense Israeli and American pressure to abandon the initiative.

But, Fabius denied that the UN option was off the table, despite the pressure, Maliki said.

He also asserted that the Palestinian leadership gave up “hope in the United States” as a reasonable broker of peace for the Palestinians.

The presence and continued expansion of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestine has created a major obstacle for the efforts to establish peace in the Middle East.

More than half a million Israelis live in over 120 illegal settlements built since Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds in 1967.

The UN and most countries regard the Israeli settlements as illegal because the territories were captured by Israel in a war in 1967 and are hence subject to the Geneva Conventions, which forbid construction on occupied lands.