WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: The EU ruled this week on Judea-Samaria product labeling. Of deepest concern must be the European view of respective Jewish-Arab Palestine equities that underlay this decision. Come see.
This Week: Beyond Just Protesting – EU Edict Shows Us the Case We Must Make
The European Union ruled this week not just that products marketed there that were made by Jews in Judea-Samaria can’t say “from Israel,” or even “from the West Bank,” but must say, e.g., “product from the West Bank (Israeli settlement).” But if made by Arabs there, “product from Palestine” would be ok.
Tons of protests rightly pointed out that this doesn’t just deny Israeli sovereignty over Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem [EU: “the West Bank (including East Jerusalem)”], but, as ZOA put it, requires “products produced by Muslims and Jews in the same geographic place to be labeled differently.” There were lots of references to Jews having been singled out in Europe heretofore. And there were lots of calls for not accepting this discrimination as the final word of the EU on product labeling.
More’s involved here than wine bottle labeling, or even EU-Israel commerce altogether. What’s involved is the EU’s, and the world’s, and our own definitions of what constitutes the Jewish homeland of Israel.
To the EU, the purpose of its Israeli product labeling legislation is not just providing consumers product origin information.
“[T]he aim is also to ensure the respect of Union positions and commitments in conformity with international law on the non-recognition by the Union of Israel’s sovereignty over the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967.”
To the EU, as stated in this week’s edict:
“The West Bank is a territory whose people, namely the Palestinian people, enjoy the right to self-determination….”
Multiple times in this edict the EU referenced this “West Bank” as “the West Bank including East Jerusalem.” The edict defines “settlement” as having “a demographic dimension beyond its geographical meaning, since it refers to a population of foreign origin.”
By us, Jews residing in historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, this “West Bank including East Jerusalem,” where Jews have lived and been thrice sovereign in the past 3,000 years, are native to the land of Israel, not “a population of foreign origin.”
Well and good. But we have to make clear to the world that we ourselves believe this.
We have to go back to calling what had been called Judea-Samaria for 3,000 years “Judea-Samaria,” not “the West Bank,” invented in 1950 to delegitimize us.
We have to reject the reality of an “East Jerusalem,” which existed for just 19 (1948-to-1967, during invader Jordan’s seizure) of those 3,000 years, ended a half-century ago by Jordan’s expulsion from the land of Israel by a homeland army of homeland Jews. The world’s “East Jerusalem” isn’t some eastern suburb or satellite of the historic city where Jewish temples stood for a thousand years and where the Temple Mount and Western Wall still stand, that’s been the capital of three native states in the past three thousand years, all of them Jewish, and that’s had a renewed Jewish majority since 1800’s Ottoman Empire rule. “East Jerusalem” IS that historic Jerusalem city itself, renamed by the world “East” to disassociate it from us.
We have to reject this week’s EU edict’s connection of the Jewish people to historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria as their being “territories occupied by the State of Israel since June 1967.” That State of Israel is the land of Israel’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, every ruler in between having been, without exception, a foreign empire invader. We’re not “occupiers.” We have a legitimate claim, the most legitimate claim, to the land.
We, all of us, Israelis and Diaspora Jews, have to stop calling Jewish communities in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem “settlements,” a term which, as this week’s EU edict noted, has “a demographic dimension beyond its geographical meaning, since it refers to a population of foreign origin.” Jews aren’t “foreigners” in Jerusalem and the rest of the land of Israel. There are few peoples in the world who are as far from foreigners in their homeland as us.
And, while we’re at it, EU, we reject your contention that “the West Bank including East Jerusalem” is “a territory whose people, namely the Palestinian people, enjoy the right to self-determination.” The League of Nations Palestine Mandate expressly recognized the Jewish people’s historical connection with Palestine and called for reconstitution therein of the Jewish national home. If that Jewish national home doesn’t reside in that remaining 22% of Palestine left after the excision from that Mandate of today’s Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan [the “Palestinian people’s” homeland if they really really want one], then where? In some non-viable nine-miles-wide-in-the-lowland-middle historic Jerusalem-less rump fraction of that remaining 22%? No thanks, world.
Ok, take a break from this high-flying language and assess where the “we” I italicized in the immediately-preceding paragraphs actually stand. The large majority of American Jews, the only large body of Diaspora Jews today, reject at least most of this. They believe, with the UN (e.g., 2334) and EU (e.g., this week’s edict), that, as the Reform just put, “the sovereign border of the State of Israel” is “the Green Line.” They believe, as the Reform and Conservatives put it in their April letter to President Trump, that the border between Israel and a new inside-the-land-of-Israel Arab state should “hew precisely” to “the 1967 borders” save for any “adjustments,” that “annexation” of “the West Bank” should be blocked. And this is the American Jewish mainstream.
My friends, let me ask you for a favor with no quid-pro-quo. Access our related website, www.factsonisrael.com. Go to the Videos page and view our “10 Misleading Media Expressions” Powerpoint talk, which we give without charge to area groups. Many American Jews use these Jewish homeland delegitimizing terms, which the EU used this week with some vigor. If our making this video’s misleading terms presentation to a synagogue group or other group to which you belong seems worthwhile to you, ask your group’s program chairpersons to view the video and contact us about our presenting it.