Officially, the European Union views Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories as illegal. But that hasn’t stopped the EU from doing booming trade with the outposts. Now a group of European NGOs has banded together to demand an end to the practice.
The European Union has long been wary of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. Indeed, its position on the issue would seem to leave little room for doubt. The Israeli outposts, the EU maintains, are “illegal under international law, constitute an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two-state solution impossible.”
According to a new report released by 22 European non-governmental organizations, however, that is only part of the story. Even as the EU condemns Israel for maintaining and expanding the settlements, the 27 member states, by virtue of heavy trade with the settlers, are actually helping the illegal towns and villages to prosper.
Assembled under the aegis of Hans van den Broek, a former European Commissioner for External Relations, the report is entitled: “Trading Away Peace:How Europe helps sustain illegal Israeli settlements.” It states that European countries import fully 15 times more goods from settlements each year than they do from Palestinian territories. In absolute terms, the Israeli government estimates that goods — including fruit, vegetables, cosmetics, textiles and toys — worth €230 million ($298 million) are exported to the EU from settlements each year, roughly 2 percent of all Israeli exports to Europe. Products sent to EU member states from the Palestinian territories, on the other hand, only add up to an average of €15 million each year.
The EU has signed international customs cooperation agreements with both Israel and the Palestinian Authority, but products from the settlements are explicitly excluded from those deals, as the European Court of Justice confirmed in a 2010 ruling. Nevertheless, the goods often avoid mandatory customs by being marked as having originated in Israel. European customs authorities are nevertheless obligated to check the postal codes of such deliveries to ensure that they do not come from the occupied territories. In practice, however, they rarely do.
Spiegel has the full article
