EU 'welcomes' Israeli settler exports, despite retail code

The EU’s envoy to Israel has said that settler exports are “welcomed” in Europe, but the best way to stop boycotts would be to make peace with Palestine.

Lars Faaberg-Anderson made the remark at an event in Jerusalem on Monday (28 March) devoted to the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement - an international campaign to stigmatise Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

The EU recently tightened up rules on grants and trade perks for settler firms as well as on retail labels for settler-made food, wine, and cosmetics.

Faaberg-Anderson said, according to Israeli media: “The settlements are not part of Israel, and for that reason products from the settlements, although they are welcomed in the European market, they are not given the same preferential treatment.”

He added: “The EU is against BDS. Our policy is totally the opposite - one of engagement with Israel, and we have a long track record to prove it.”

He said the BDS movement has a “marginal” impact on Israel.

“The most effective antidote to BDS is to solve the Palestinian issue. If it were solved, there would be no BDS movement. It would shrink into virtually nothing,” he added.

EU states last week also tried to defeat a project to create a UN list of companies that profit from settlements.

The UNHCR, the UN’s human rights body, went ahead anyway after a majority of 32 member states, including China, Russia, and Switzerland, as well as African, Arab and Latin American countries, voted Yes.

It means the Geneva-based body will “produce a database of all business enterprises involved in the [settlement] activities … to be updated annually.”

All eight EU members who currently sit on the UNHCR - Belgium, France, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, and the UK - had abstained.

EU-aligned members - Albania, Georgia, and Macedonia - also abstained.

The vote passed despite the fact the British and Dutch UNHCR ambassadors spoke out against the list at the UN meeting last Thursday, with the British envoy saying it would be “damaging” to the peace process, according to Israeli daily Haaretz.

EU states were less united on a separate UNHCR resolution, which endorsed a preliminary investigation into the 2014 war in Gaza by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, however.

Belgium, France, Portugal, and Slovenia voted Yes to the text, while the other four EU members abstained.

Mahmoud Nawajaa, a spokesman for the BDS movement, said in a statement that Faaberg-Anderson’s remarks mean the EU “is complicit in Israel’s serious violations of international law.”

BDS groups were also angry the EU diplomat agreed to sit on the same panel as Dani Dayan, a hard-right Israeli politician

But the EU envoy told press at the BDS event: “I’m totally undeterred by allegations against me.”

The anti-BDS event, which was sponsored by Israeli media Ynet and Yediot Ahronoth, also heard from the US envoy to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, who echoed his EU counterpart.

“One of our most effective tools to defeat boycotts and delegitimisation is the presentation of a political process, negotiations or some political horizon that gives hope for a two-states-for-two-peoples resolution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict,” Shapiro said.

The BDS movement recently claimed that a decision by British private security firm, G4S, to sell off assets in Israel was due to its campaign, but the firm denies this.

Dutch and Norwegian pension companies as well as French water-management and telecommunications firms have also divested Israeli assets in the past two years.

Israeli settler exports to the EU are worth less than 1 percent of bilateral trade.

The EU institutions have indicated they won't prosecute countries which ignore the retail labels regime, even though it is grounded in binding EU consumer protection laws.