Thirty six US senators suggested Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations with the European Union could be complicated if the EU moves forward with a product-labeling policy to highlight goods made in Jewish-only settlements in Occupied Palestine.
The bipartisan group on Monday, led by Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to EU head envoy Federica Mogherini in a message that effectively treated wide swaths of the West Bank as Israeli territory.
“Differentiating between products made by Israeli companies creates a troubling precedent that could eventually lead to the type of activities that the TPA provisions aim to address,” the senators said, referring to an anti-Israeli boycott amendment that earlier this year was a part of the agenda-setting Trade Promotion Authority bill. Their letter did not once mention either Israel’s settlements nor its occupation.
The referenced legislation, which enjoyed wide bipartisan support in Congress, ordered the US Trade Representative to “discourage” the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in European countries during ongoing TTIP negotiations, although the extent to which the President can legally abate a non-violent movement organized almost entirely by foreign non-state actors is not exactly clear.
The Obama administration did note in July, however, that it opposed the anti-BDS language for “conflating Israel and ‘Israeli-controlled territories.’”
“The United States government has … strongly opposed boycotts, divestment campaigns, and sanctions targeting the State of Israel, and will continue to do so,” State Department spokesperson John Kirby said. “Every US administration since 1967–Democrat and Republican alike–has opposed Israeli settlement activity beyond the 1967 lines.”
Last week, Israeli officials said that the EU would be releasing the settlement product-labeling guidelines this Wednesday, according to Ha’aretz.
The labeling initiative was propelled in the spring, when 16 EU member state foreign ministers petitioned Mogherini to expedite the settlement good labeling process, citing concerns about Israel’s “lack of interest in advancing a two-state solution,” according to The Guardian.
BDS was launched in 2005 by a wide cross-section of Palestinian civil society to encourage a global solidarity movement modeled after the international boycott campaign that preceded the end of the Apartheid regime in South Africa.
Prominent black South Africans who fought the now-defunct white supremacist system and many others, including one living former US President, have likened the Israeli system to “Apartheid.” Bishop Desmond Tutu said in 2014 that he sees “a mirror image of the sort of things I experienced under Apartheid” when he visited Israel and Palestine. Nelson Mandela once described Yasser Arafat as a “comrade in arms.” In 2006, Jimmy Carter actually described Israeli West Bank settlement policies as “worse than Aparthied.”
BDS has recently gained traction in the US, breaking into the mainstream labor movement for the first time this autumn.
In September, the 750,000-member strong Union of Electrical Workers (UE) endorsed the movement. According to In These Times, the labor union passed a pro-BDS resolution at its national convention as “a specific response to Palestinian trade unions who hoped for immediate aid in the midst of the Israeli shelling of Gaza in July 2014.”
“We reached a breaking point when Israel launched the war on Gaza in 2014, killing over 2,000 people including 500 children. Because Israel has been unwilling to engage in real negotiations to bring about a just resolution to the occupation, this is a necessary step for labor to take in order to bring about a peaceful end to the conflicts there,” UE Western Region President Carl Rosen said.
Late last month, the 200,000-member strong Connecticut AFL-CIO also passed a resolution in support of BDS that criticized the occupation and last summer’s Israeli military operations in Gaza.
“[D]espite this ongoing tragedy, Israel remains the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II to date having received $124.3 billion in bilateral assistance that continues at the rate of $3.3 billion per year,” the resolution stated.
