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It will now be easier for supporters of Israel to purposely buy products made in Judea and Samaria. Turn Europe’s new labelling requirements into an opportunity to support Israel! 

The European Court of Justice has recently ruled that all Israeli products sold in the European Union, but originating in the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) must be labelled as such. The reason? The West Bank is “occupied territory.”

This is just another way of telling the Jewish people that they do not have a right to live in their ancestral homeland. That right belongs exclusively to Palestinians. No Jews allowed. If this isn’t anti-Semitism, I don’t know what is.

In a much more positive development, The Trump Administration has announced that the U.S. will no longer consider the prosperous, thriving communities that Israel has built in Judea and Samaria to be a contravention of international law. This recent announcement is a huge victory for Zionism, for the Jewish people and for the truth. Say what you want about President Trump, but in this case, he is on the right side of history.

Liberation, Not ‘Occupation’

The presence of Jews and the Jewish state is not an “occupation.” If anything, it is a liberation. It is a return of the Jewish people to the land of their forefathers.

But let’s assume, hypothetically, for a moment, that Judea and Samaria, otherwise known as the West Bank, is occupied territory. Is the EU mandating special labels on Chinese products made in Tibet because Tibet is illegally occupied by China? No, because the EU doesn’t have a problem with China violating the rights of Tibetans and illegally stealing their land and sovereignty. How about Turkish products from Kurdistan, or products made in the Americas or Australia on land stolen by Europeans from the indigenous inhabitants? Nope, no special labelling for them either. What about when the West Bank was illegally annexed by the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Did Jordanian products originating from the West Bank get special labels? Again, the answer is no. The EU has seen fit to single out only the Jews.

How dare the EU, which represents countries with the blood of six million Jews on their hands, tell the Jewish people where they can and can’t live. It’s not surprising though. The Europeans have been trying to dictate where Jews can reside and where they can’t for centuries. Throughout the history of Europe, Jews were expelled wholesale from European countries and territories countless times. If they were not expelled, they were confined in ghettos or only allowed to reside in certain parts of a given country. And almost always accompanying the Europeans’ policies of expulsion and ghettoization were brutal massacres where Jews were slaughtered with impunity. The ruling of the European Court of Justice is simply a continuation of these policies, but with a significant difference. Now the Europeans want to dictate where Jews can live outside of Europe. In their own ancestral homeland, no less. It’s as if they want to turn Israel into a ghetto and tell the Jews they can only live within the confines of the pre-1967 armistice lines. The West Bank, say the Europeans, must be Judenrein.

BDS Harms Palestinian Arabs

I’m sure the proponents of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement are very happy now that the EU has formally joined them in their efforts to demonize and de-legitimize the State of Israel. As for the Palestinians that they claim to be helping, the recent EU court decision could harm them more than it will harm the Israelis, because if the new labelling requirement does result in European consumers not buying products from Israeli businesses located in the West Bank, the Palestinians who are often involved in making those products will ultimately lose their jobs.

This has already happened. Years ago, the Israeli company SodaStream moved one of their factories out of the West Bank due to pressure from the BDS movement. As a result, many Palestinians that worked in that factory lost their jobs. Congratulations, BDS. You managed to get Palestinians who you say you are trying to help unemployed. So much for your help. Then again, maybe the BDS folks want the Palestinians to be jobless and hopeless, because it will encourage them to take up the only other lucrative opportunity there is in the West Bank: killing Jews in exchange for cash handouts from the Palestinian Authority.

There you have it. The BDS folks don’t really want a better life for the Palestinians. They just want to keep the Palestinians in eternal misery so that they’ll keep blaming the Jews for their problems, thereby motivating many of them to kill Jews without end.

So how should Israel and its supporters respond to this heinous decision by the European Court of Justice? One way is to turn the new labelling requirements into an opportunity to support Israel, because since Israeli products from the West Bank will now have labels telling consumers that they’re from the Biblical Jewish homeland of Judea and Samaria, it will be easier for supporters of Israel to purposely buy products made in the territory as a way of telling the EU that no one can tell the Jews they cannot live in the land of their forefathers. In other words, we turn the boycott of Israel upside down and use it to support the Jewish state.

Furthermore, if the Europeans want to give Israeli products special labels to indicate that they are from a disputed territory, perhaps Israel should label products that come from disputed regions of Europe. Then, Israeli consumers would have the choice not to buy products made in Catalonia, Brittany or Corsica, because policies that promote boycotts can work both ways. As some people say, what goes around comes around.

Article by Jason Shvili

Yosef Shvili is a freelance writer in Toronto, Canada, and a passionate advocate for Israel. He has a Master's degree in Political Science from the University of Toronto, specializing in ethnic and pluralism studies.