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While the labelling guidelines prompted a rift between Israel and the EU, their economic effect is minimal.

By Nigel Wilson, AL JAZEERA

A year after the European Union issued labelling guidelines for products imported from illegal Israeli settlements based in the occupied territories, the economic effect on settlements businesses appear to be minimal, according to analysts.

“What’s actually happened, and I think part of it is due to ferocious Israeli pushback, is that there’s very little follow up on the guidelines,” said Hugh Lovatt, Israel/Palestine project coordinator at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

In November 2015, the European Commission published its guidelines, stating that agricultural and food products that originated in occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Golan Heights, all territories occupied by Israel since 1967, should not be labelled as if they were made in Israel.

“It’s about clarifying what the guidelines are,” Lovatt told Al Jazeera. However, due to what Lovatt described as a lack of monitoring and enforcement on the national level, the onus is on civil society to show the authorities “how this domestic legislation is not being followed by retailers, who have less of a case now to plead ignorance of requirements”.

“This is the process that has happened in France,” said Lovatt.

On November 24, France became the first EU member state to publish its own guidelines for retailers and importers one year after the EU labelling rules came out.

The French announcement said that “under international law, the Golan Heights and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are not part of Israel” and recommended retailers use labels such as “made in the West Bank (Israeli settlement)” for products that originate from the occupied territories.

Palestinian civil society groups had pressured the EU to explicitly label products from the settlements for decades in an attempt to both increase transparency on the origins of those products and to raise international awareness of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

However, the enforcement of the guidelines was left to the individual EU member states. The Israeli government applied fierce political pressure on European governments not to comply, drawing comparisons between the labelling guidelines and anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe around the time of the second world war.

Despite EU leaders defending the measures as technical, implementation seems to have been limited throughout Europe.

A few days after the EU decision, when a German department store removed settlement products in order to label them correctly, the store was targeted in an online campaign and accused of “anti-Semitism”, forcing it to apologise and re-stock the products within days.

While the French move could potentially set a precedent for other European countries to follow, the lack of enforcement to date is evident at the Psagot Winery, where the owner Yaakov Berg has not changed a single label on his wine bottles since the EU guidelines were published a year ago.

Located in an industrial zone southeast of Ramallah, deep in the occupied West Bank, Berg said his winery has actually increased the amount of …read more

Source:: Israpundit

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