To its credit, France is one of the first countries in Europe to ban economic boycotts of Israel. To its shame, France is the first European country to implement a 2015 European Union decision to label Israeli products from Judea and Samaria—the West Bank—and the Golan Heights.
Who, besides France’s Jewish community—already diminished by the sharp rise in anti-Semitism in the country—will buy products labelled “Made in an Israeli Settlement”? Who is the French government fooling when it says that it is against any boycott of Israel and then acts to facilitate one?
Such a policy is viewed by the vast majority of Israelis as highly prejudicial if not anti-Semitic. There are 200 territorial disputes in the world today, and France has singled out one of them—Israel’s with the Palestinians—for special treatment. There is no French labelling of Chinese goods from Tibet or Moroccan goods from Western Sahara. And in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, France labels products from only one party—the Jews.
Most indefensibly, France regards the Golan Heights, where there is not a single Palestinian, as occupied territory. Occupied from what country, one might ask? Syria, which lost the Golan to Israel nearly 50 years ago after twice using the area to wage genocidal wars against the Jewish State, no longer exists. To who would France want Israel to return the Golan—to ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, or Bashar al-Assad?
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