21 june 2019
On June 20, 2019, the ‘International Day of Refugees’, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics released a report showing that nearly half of all Palestinians throughout the world, were registered as refugees in 2018.
According to United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), of the 13 million Palestinians in Palestine and the Diaspora, 6 million are registered as refugees.
In 1948, the Palestinian Nakba began, when the land was occupied, and 800,000 indigenous people from 1,300 towns and villages were forcefully expelled from historical Palestine.
The report breaks down that 17% of the 6 million Palestinian refugees, or 1,020,000 live in the West Bank, and 25% or 1,500,000 of the total number of Palestinian refugees are in the Gaza Strip.
Jordan hosts the largest Palestinian refugee population at 39%, or 2,340,000, while Syria is home to 11% or 660,000, and finally Lebanon with 9%, or 540,000 Palestinian refugees.
In 1967, another 300,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, and today, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues with home demolitions occurring on a near daily basis in and around the cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, and Nablus, to name a few.
According to United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), of the 13 million Palestinians in Palestine and the Diaspora, 6 million are registered as refugees.
In 1948, the Palestinian Nakba began, when the land was occupied, and 800,000 indigenous people from 1,300 towns and villages were forcefully expelled from historical Palestine.
The report breaks down that 17% of the 6 million Palestinian refugees, or 1,020,000 live in the West Bank, and 25% or 1,500,000 of the total number of Palestinian refugees are in the Gaza Strip.
Jordan hosts the largest Palestinian refugee population at 39%, or 2,340,000, while Syria is home to 11% or 660,000, and finally Lebanon with 9%, or 540,000 Palestinian refugees.
In 1967, another 300,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, and today, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues with home demolitions occurring on a near daily basis in and around the cities of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Hebron, and Nablus, to name a few.
The Israeli High Court has granted its approval for the demolition of 16 apartment buildings of 100 flats in Wadi al-Hummus neighborhood in Sur Baher village, south of occupied East Jerusalem, for “being built close to the Annexation Wall.”
The court upheld allegations by the military in which it claimed that the buildings are close to the Annexation Wall, and “pose a security threat,” due to their proximity to the illegal wall.
The Palestinians were ordered to demolish the apartments by July 18th, or face very high fines and fees, in addition to the demolition costs, should the Jerusalem City Council demolish their buildings.
Khalil Tafakji, the head of the Maps Department of the Arab Studies Society in occupied Jerusalem, said Wadi al-Hummus is in Area A of the West Bank, supposedly under the full control of the Palestinian Authority as per the Oslo Accords.
Tafakji added that when Israel started the construction of the illegal Annexation Wall in 2003, Sur Baher residents filed appeals against the planned route of the wall, as it passes right through the center of the village.
Israel then adjusted the route, keeping the entire neighborhood inside the boundaries of the wall, instead of being isolated from Jerusalem, or split in half.
He also stated that, since the neighborhood was considered to be in Area A, the Palestinians obtained construction permits from the Palestinian Ministry of Local Government.
In addition, Tafakji said that the Israeli High Court based its decision on an order, issued seven years ago by the military commander in the area, preventing the Palestinians from constructing in any area that is less than 250 meters from the Annexation Wall.
“What is happening in Sur Baher is similar to what Israel is trying to implement in the Shayyah area, in the al-Ezariyya town, and all other Palestinian communities around occupied Jerusalem,” Tafakji stated, “All these resolutions are demographic in nature, only aim at removing the Palestinians from Jerusalem.”
There are around 6000 Palestinians living in Wadi al-Hummus neighborhood, who now all face displacement, especially after the court only granted them one month to demolish their buildings.
On his part, Attorney Haitham Khatib, the head of the Legal Department of The Catholic Center for Human Rights, Sr. Yves, said the Israeli court completely adopted the allegation of the Israeli military in its ruling, which violates the basic rights of the Palestinian people.
Khatib added that this ruling is very serious, as it could also be implemented in all Palestinian areas, where the Wall was built near them, across the West Bank, and not only in Jerusalem.
He also said that, in 2011, the Military Commander in the occupied West Bank, issued an order denying the Palestinians the right to build in any area within 250 meters from the Wall, and added that, although the decision remained active, it was never implemented.
However, in the year 2018, the Israeli army decided to implement the ruling, and started by handing demolition orders targeting 16 apartment buildings in Wadi al-Hummus neighborhood.
“This is a very serious violation of the Palestinians rights; this ruling is a green light for the demolition of hundreds of homes in all Palestinian communities and neighborhoods where Israel built Annexation Wall close to them,” Khatib said.
On his part, the Palestinian Minister for Jerusalem Affairs Fadi al-Hadmi, said that the Ministry’s Legal Department is following this issue, in cooperation with the Foreign Affairs Ministry, especially since these orders are serious violations not only of basic Palestinian rights, but also of International Law, International Humanitarian Law and the Fourth Geneva Conventions.
“The International Community must end is silence and uphold its responsibilities in protecting the Palestinian people from the Israeli apartheid policies,” al-Hadmi stated, “We will continue to defend our people, our existence in Jerusalem, and we will counter these racist policies and rulings.”
A report by the “Colonization & Wall Resistance Commission” has revealed that, last year, Israel demolished 471 Palestinian buildings, and issued orders for the destruction of an additional 546 structures, including 50 schools.
The report said that, although the demotions were mainly carried out in and around occupied East Jerusalem, they also included many areas in other parts of the West Bank.
The court upheld allegations by the military in which it claimed that the buildings are close to the Annexation Wall, and “pose a security threat,” due to their proximity to the illegal wall.
The Palestinians were ordered to demolish the apartments by July 18th, or face very high fines and fees, in addition to the demolition costs, should the Jerusalem City Council demolish their buildings.
Khalil Tafakji, the head of the Maps Department of the Arab Studies Society in occupied Jerusalem, said Wadi al-Hummus is in Area A of the West Bank, supposedly under the full control of the Palestinian Authority as per the Oslo Accords.
Tafakji added that when Israel started the construction of the illegal Annexation Wall in 2003, Sur Baher residents filed appeals against the planned route of the wall, as it passes right through the center of the village.
Israel then adjusted the route, keeping the entire neighborhood inside the boundaries of the wall, instead of being isolated from Jerusalem, or split in half.
He also stated that, since the neighborhood was considered to be in Area A, the Palestinians obtained construction permits from the Palestinian Ministry of Local Government.
In addition, Tafakji said that the Israeli High Court based its decision on an order, issued seven years ago by the military commander in the area, preventing the Palestinians from constructing in any area that is less than 250 meters from the Annexation Wall.
“What is happening in Sur Baher is similar to what Israel is trying to implement in the Shayyah area, in the al-Ezariyya town, and all other Palestinian communities around occupied Jerusalem,” Tafakji stated, “All these resolutions are demographic in nature, only aim at removing the Palestinians from Jerusalem.”
There are around 6000 Palestinians living in Wadi al-Hummus neighborhood, who now all face displacement, especially after the court only granted them one month to demolish their buildings.
On his part, Attorney Haitham Khatib, the head of the Legal Department of The Catholic Center for Human Rights, Sr. Yves, said the Israeli court completely adopted the allegation of the Israeli military in its ruling, which violates the basic rights of the Palestinian people.
Khatib added that this ruling is very serious, as it could also be implemented in all Palestinian areas, where the Wall was built near them, across the West Bank, and not only in Jerusalem.
He also said that, in 2011, the Military Commander in the occupied West Bank, issued an order denying the Palestinians the right to build in any area within 250 meters from the Wall, and added that, although the decision remained active, it was never implemented.
However, in the year 2018, the Israeli army decided to implement the ruling, and started by handing demolition orders targeting 16 apartment buildings in Wadi al-Hummus neighborhood.
“This is a very serious violation of the Palestinians rights; this ruling is a green light for the demolition of hundreds of homes in all Palestinian communities and neighborhoods where Israel built Annexation Wall close to them,” Khatib said.
On his part, the Palestinian Minister for Jerusalem Affairs Fadi al-Hadmi, said that the Ministry’s Legal Department is following this issue, in cooperation with the Foreign Affairs Ministry, especially since these orders are serious violations not only of basic Palestinian rights, but also of International Law, International Humanitarian Law and the Fourth Geneva Conventions.
“The International Community must end is silence and uphold its responsibilities in protecting the Palestinian people from the Israeli apartheid policies,” al-Hadmi stated, “We will continue to defend our people, our existence in Jerusalem, and we will counter these racist policies and rulings.”
A report by the “Colonization & Wall Resistance Commission” has revealed that, last year, Israel demolished 471 Palestinian buildings, and issued orders for the destruction of an additional 546 structures, including 50 schools.
The report said that, although the demotions were mainly carried out in and around occupied East Jerusalem, they also included many areas in other parts of the West Bank.
17 june 2019
By Asa Winstanley
A new World Heath Organization report on Gaza this month made for shocking reading.
But as usual when it comes to our hopelessly Israel-sympathetic media, there was barely a whisper about it in the “mainstream” papers.
It states that in the course of the year following the start of the Great March of Return protests in March 2018, Israeli army thugs killed 277 Palestinians, including 52 children.
Most of these were murdered in cold blood during the unarmed, massive popular protests that took place along the boundary line between Gaza and Israel. Almost without fail, the protesters have returned every week, time and again since then, to protest against Israel and its crimes.
More than that, the protests are for the Return – the non-negotiable predicate of the Palestinian liberation struggle. And they are more than merely symbolic. They are marching for a real return to their homelands.
The population of the Gaza Strip is overwhelmingly – 73 per cent – made up of refugees. That is, if you ask the young, unarmed refugee protestors risking their lives to return to their homes where they are from, they will not reply “from Gaza.”
They will tell you that they are from Jaffa, they are from al-Majdal, or they are from some other Palestinian population centre in what is now called Israel. They will tell you that, because it is their truth.
They are the refugees, and they do not and will not forget, generation after generation. And now, for the past year, they are marching as the start of their long return to Palestine.
They tell the objective historical truth: their parents and grandparents were expelled at the barrel of the gun and under the threat of the bomb, victims of what one future Israeli prime minister once called “cruel Zionism.”
The Nakba was the defining event in Palestinian history – although it has never really ended since 1948. The most infamous event of all, it involved the expulsion of around 800,000 Palestinians, the majority, from their homeland by force.
This was not some accident, or unintended consequence of war, as Zionist propaganda long held. It was a deliberate consequence of decades of Zionist agitation for the “transfer” of the indigenous population out of the country for the crime of not being Jewish.
From Theodor Herzl’s plan to “spirit the penniless population” over the border, until the current day Israeli government’s threats to annex the West Bank, Zionism has always entailed forced expulsions, war crimes, terrorism, racism and repression of the native Palestinian population.
And so we read in this new WHO report that there were nearly 7,000 gunshot wounds among Gaza’s population of two million during a single year.
As my colleague Maureen Murphy at The Electronic Intifada reported: “Many of those injured have extensive and in some cases irreversible damage to their bones, neurovascular structures and soft tissue.
Among them, hundreds face amputations if they cannot access specialized tertiary treatment for their catastrophic wounds.
Three health workers have been killed and more than 700 others injured.
Thousands of elective surgeries were postponed as a health system already in crisis took in wave after wave of emergency casualties.”
Such systemic violence and such a cruel policy of serious injury to unarmed protesters can only be deliberate. Again, it is a longstanding policy.
Recall the infamous command of Israeli Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Yitzhak Rabin for his soldiers to “break the bones” of Palestinian children protesting against the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the first intifada – the popular uprising of the Palestinian people for freedom.
As well as being inherently racist, Zionism is inherently violent.
A Jewish settler-colony in a historic territory, Palestine, which is overwhelming non-Jewish can only ever be sustained by massive systemic, sustained violence.
That is the brutal reality behind the so-called “Jewish state.” A homogeneous project like Zionism in a heterogeneous, multi-religious, multi-ethnic country like Palestine is as doomed to failure in the long term as the European Crusader kingdoms were.
- Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist living in London who writes about Palestine and the Middle East. He has been visiting Palestine since 2004 and is originally from south Wales. He writes for the award-winning Palestinian news site The Electronic Intifada where he is an associate editor and also a weekly column for the Middle East Monitor where this article was published.
A new World Heath Organization report on Gaza this month made for shocking reading.
But as usual when it comes to our hopelessly Israel-sympathetic media, there was barely a whisper about it in the “mainstream” papers.
It states that in the course of the year following the start of the Great March of Return protests in March 2018, Israeli army thugs killed 277 Palestinians, including 52 children.
Most of these were murdered in cold blood during the unarmed, massive popular protests that took place along the boundary line between Gaza and Israel. Almost without fail, the protesters have returned every week, time and again since then, to protest against Israel and its crimes.
More than that, the protests are for the Return – the non-negotiable predicate of the Palestinian liberation struggle. And they are more than merely symbolic. They are marching for a real return to their homelands.
The population of the Gaza Strip is overwhelmingly – 73 per cent – made up of refugees. That is, if you ask the young, unarmed refugee protestors risking their lives to return to their homes where they are from, they will not reply “from Gaza.”
They will tell you that they are from Jaffa, they are from al-Majdal, or they are from some other Palestinian population centre in what is now called Israel. They will tell you that, because it is their truth.
They are the refugees, and they do not and will not forget, generation after generation. And now, for the past year, they are marching as the start of their long return to Palestine.
They tell the objective historical truth: their parents and grandparents were expelled at the barrel of the gun and under the threat of the bomb, victims of what one future Israeli prime minister once called “cruel Zionism.”
The Nakba was the defining event in Palestinian history – although it has never really ended since 1948. The most infamous event of all, it involved the expulsion of around 800,000 Palestinians, the majority, from their homeland by force.
This was not some accident, or unintended consequence of war, as Zionist propaganda long held. It was a deliberate consequence of decades of Zionist agitation for the “transfer” of the indigenous population out of the country for the crime of not being Jewish.
From Theodor Herzl’s plan to “spirit the penniless population” over the border, until the current day Israeli government’s threats to annex the West Bank, Zionism has always entailed forced expulsions, war crimes, terrorism, racism and repression of the native Palestinian population.
And so we read in this new WHO report that there were nearly 7,000 gunshot wounds among Gaza’s population of two million during a single year.
As my colleague Maureen Murphy at The Electronic Intifada reported: “Many of those injured have extensive and in some cases irreversible damage to their bones, neurovascular structures and soft tissue.
Among them, hundreds face amputations if they cannot access specialized tertiary treatment for their catastrophic wounds.
Three health workers have been killed and more than 700 others injured.
Thousands of elective surgeries were postponed as a health system already in crisis took in wave after wave of emergency casualties.”
Such systemic violence and such a cruel policy of serious injury to unarmed protesters can only be deliberate. Again, it is a longstanding policy.
Recall the infamous command of Israeli Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Yitzhak Rabin for his soldiers to “break the bones” of Palestinian children protesting against the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip during the first intifada – the popular uprising of the Palestinian people for freedom.
As well as being inherently racist, Zionism is inherently violent.
A Jewish settler-colony in a historic territory, Palestine, which is overwhelming non-Jewish can only ever be sustained by massive systemic, sustained violence.
That is the brutal reality behind the so-called “Jewish state.” A homogeneous project like Zionism in a heterogeneous, multi-religious, multi-ethnic country like Palestine is as doomed to failure in the long term as the European Crusader kingdoms were.
- Asa Winstanley is an investigative journalist living in London who writes about Palestine and the Middle East. He has been visiting Palestine since 2004 and is originally from south Wales. He writes for the award-winning Palestinian news site The Electronic Intifada where he is an associate editor and also a weekly column for the Middle East Monitor where this article was published.
US-based group HaYovel brings Christian Zionist volunteers to harvest grapes in Israeli-settlement wineries established on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law. An EU legal opinion confirms such wines should be accurately labeled as originating from settlements. (via Facebook)
Selling settlement products as “Made in Israel” may mislead consumers and stop them from making what they consider to be ethical buying choices, a senior European Union legal official says.
“Just as many European consumers objected to the purchase of South African goods in the pre-1994 apartheid era, present-day consumers may object on similar grounds to the purchase of goods from a particular country” because it pursues “policies which that consumer happens to find objectionable or even repugnant,” Gerard Hogan, advocate general of the Court of Justice of the European Union, writes in an advisory opinion published last week.
The opinion specifies that consumers may object to buying goods from Israeli settlements “precisely because of the fact that the occupation and the settlements clearly amount to a violation of international law.”
Israel’s construction of settlements on occupied Palestinian and Syrian land is a war crime.
A 2011 EU directive requires accurate labeling of goods in order to protect a consumer’s right to information, including the origin of a product.
In 2015, the EU issued an “interpretive notice” requiring goods made in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights to be labeled as originating from such settlements.
The French government then issued a regulation in 2016 requiring such labeling on settlement goods.
Two years later, Psagot Winery and the Jewish communal group Organisation Juive Européenne filed a lawsuit with the French Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, claiming the practice is discriminatory.
In response, French authorities suspended the labeling requirement and referred the case to the EU Court of Justice seeking guidance.
The advocate general’s legal opinions are not binding on the EU court, but they are authoritative and are followed in the majority of cases. The EU court has yet to issue its own ruling.
The French court will then have to settle the dispute in line with the EU court’s decision, which will also be binding on other national courts.
Growing grapes on stolen land
The Israeli wine industry is deeply complicit in the occupation and colonization of Palestinian and Syrian land.
Dozens of Israeli wineries in the West Bank and the Golan use stolen land and water resources, according to monitoring group Who Profits.
Large commercial wineries within present-day Israel – like Teperberg Winery – use grapes from occupied West Bank land in their wines.
Psagot Winery is a stellar example of a settlement profiteer.
It is based in the settlement of Pisgat Zeev in occupied East Jerusalem and its winery sources grapes from vineyards near the settlements of Psagot, Kida, Har Bracha, Gush Etzion and Elon Moreh.
Psagot Winery’s visitors center is in the settlement of Psagot, just outside Ramallah.
Yaakov Berg, founder of Psagot Winery, immigrated with his family from the Soviet Union to Israel at a young age.
With the assistance of occupation authorities and the World Zionist Organization, Berg’s father, Meri Berg, had by the 1990s begun seizing land from the Palestinian village of al-Bireh, according to Israeli settlement monitoring organization Kerem Navot.
Yaakov Berg also received financing from the settlement division of the World Zionist Organization to expand the wine business he founded on the land stolen by his father.
“Within a few years, Psagot Winery, which started as a modest family enterprise, became a winery that produces hundreds of thousands of bottles a year, including those destined for export to countries in the European Union,” Kerem Navot notes.
Psagot Winery partner Josh Hexter thinks that despite the winery’s location, BDS – the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement for Palestinian rights – is not a problem because the largest oveseas customer base “are Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox wine drinkers,” as The Times of Israel reported.
“It might even be a plus for some of our customers,” Hexter said.
And each year, a group of American Christian Zionists comes to help with the grape harvest at Psagot and other settlements.
The organization HaYovel brings Christian volunteers to “prophetically serve” Jewish farmers in “Judea and Samaria.”
HaYovel recently sponsored a fundraiser honoring Yehuda Glick, a leader of the Israeli-government backed Jewish extremist movement that aims to destroy the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and replace it with a Jewish temple.
Undermining rights
Yet there can be no doubt about the illegality of Psagot Winery’s business.
The International Court of Justice and countless UN resolutions have declared the construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied Golan and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, illegal.
Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented the devastating impact of Israel’s settlement enterprise and called on all businesses to stop working in or with settlements.
But Psagot Winery and its supporters don’t care about international law, EU law or Palestinian rights.
Nor do EU governments, which have done little or nothing to enforce EU rules and international law.
Amnesty and others have called on governments to ban trade in settlement goods altogether, yet after decades of inaction, EU countries are still quibbling over mere labeling.
While Israel lobby groups use any opportunity to bully and intimidate citizens who criticize Israel’s violations of international law, the advocate general affirms that it is not the task of the EU Court of Justice to approve or to disapprove consumers’ ethical choices.
That is up to individuals, who are entitled to make those choices based on full and accurate information.
It remains to be seen whether the court itself will accept the advocate general’s reasoning and limit Israel’s ability to profit with impunity from its crimes by affirming that accurate labeling of settlement goods is required.
Ali Abunimah contributed research.
Selling settlement products as “Made in Israel” may mislead consumers and stop them from making what they consider to be ethical buying choices, a senior European Union legal official says.
“Just as many European consumers objected to the purchase of South African goods in the pre-1994 apartheid era, present-day consumers may object on similar grounds to the purchase of goods from a particular country” because it pursues “policies which that consumer happens to find objectionable or even repugnant,” Gerard Hogan, advocate general of the Court of Justice of the European Union, writes in an advisory opinion published last week.
The opinion specifies that consumers may object to buying goods from Israeli settlements “precisely because of the fact that the occupation and the settlements clearly amount to a violation of international law.”
Israel’s construction of settlements on occupied Palestinian and Syrian land is a war crime.
A 2011 EU directive requires accurate labeling of goods in order to protect a consumer’s right to information, including the origin of a product.
In 2015, the EU issued an “interpretive notice” requiring goods made in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights to be labeled as originating from such settlements.
The French government then issued a regulation in 2016 requiring such labeling on settlement goods.
Two years later, Psagot Winery and the Jewish communal group Organisation Juive Européenne filed a lawsuit with the French Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, claiming the practice is discriminatory.
In response, French authorities suspended the labeling requirement and referred the case to the EU Court of Justice seeking guidance.
The advocate general’s legal opinions are not binding on the EU court, but they are authoritative and are followed in the majority of cases. The EU court has yet to issue its own ruling.
The French court will then have to settle the dispute in line with the EU court’s decision, which will also be binding on other national courts.
Growing grapes on stolen land
The Israeli wine industry is deeply complicit in the occupation and colonization of Palestinian and Syrian land.
Dozens of Israeli wineries in the West Bank and the Golan use stolen land and water resources, according to monitoring group Who Profits.
Large commercial wineries within present-day Israel – like Teperberg Winery – use grapes from occupied West Bank land in their wines.
Psagot Winery is a stellar example of a settlement profiteer.
It is based in the settlement of Pisgat Zeev in occupied East Jerusalem and its winery sources grapes from vineyards near the settlements of Psagot, Kida, Har Bracha, Gush Etzion and Elon Moreh.
Psagot Winery’s visitors center is in the settlement of Psagot, just outside Ramallah.
Yaakov Berg, founder of Psagot Winery, immigrated with his family from the Soviet Union to Israel at a young age.
With the assistance of occupation authorities and the World Zionist Organization, Berg’s father, Meri Berg, had by the 1990s begun seizing land from the Palestinian village of al-Bireh, according to Israeli settlement monitoring organization Kerem Navot.
Yaakov Berg also received financing from the settlement division of the World Zionist Organization to expand the wine business he founded on the land stolen by his father.
“Within a few years, Psagot Winery, which started as a modest family enterprise, became a winery that produces hundreds of thousands of bottles a year, including those destined for export to countries in the European Union,” Kerem Navot notes.
Psagot Winery partner Josh Hexter thinks that despite the winery’s location, BDS – the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement for Palestinian rights – is not a problem because the largest oveseas customer base “are Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox wine drinkers,” as The Times of Israel reported.
“It might even be a plus for some of our customers,” Hexter said.
And each year, a group of American Christian Zionists comes to help with the grape harvest at Psagot and other settlements.
The organization HaYovel brings Christian volunteers to “prophetically serve” Jewish farmers in “Judea and Samaria.”
HaYovel recently sponsored a fundraiser honoring Yehuda Glick, a leader of the Israeli-government backed Jewish extremist movement that aims to destroy the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and replace it with a Jewish temple.
Undermining rights
Yet there can be no doubt about the illegality of Psagot Winery’s business.
The International Court of Justice and countless UN resolutions have declared the construction of Israeli settlements in the occupied Golan and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, illegal.
Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have documented the devastating impact of Israel’s settlement enterprise and called on all businesses to stop working in or with settlements.
But Psagot Winery and its supporters don’t care about international law, EU law or Palestinian rights.
Nor do EU governments, which have done little or nothing to enforce EU rules and international law.
Amnesty and others have called on governments to ban trade in settlement goods altogether, yet after decades of inaction, EU countries are still quibbling over mere labeling.
While Israel lobby groups use any opportunity to bully and intimidate citizens who criticize Israel’s violations of international law, the advocate general affirms that it is not the task of the EU Court of Justice to approve or to disapprove consumers’ ethical choices.
That is up to individuals, who are entitled to make those choices based on full and accurate information.
It remains to be seen whether the court itself will accept the advocate general’s reasoning and limit Israel’s ability to profit with impunity from its crimes by affirming that accurate labeling of settlement goods is required.
Ali Abunimah contributed research.
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