For the Sake of Zion..
01 July '13..
For the European Union (EU), labeling Hezbollah as a terrorist organization amounts to a tough philosophical question. But labeling Israeli products from Judea and Samaria as non-Israeli entails no such travails.
While there is no question that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, defining Judea and Samaria as “occupied territory” is debatable at best.
In international law, a territory is occupied when it has been conquered from a sovereign country. The west bank of the Jordan River was neither a sovereign country nor part of a sovereign country when it was conquered by Israel in June 1967. During the 1948 War, and as a result of the 1949 Armistice Agreements, he Hashemite Kingdom conquered and annexed the hilltops of what was supposed to become part of an Arab state according to the 1947 Partition Plan. This annexation was never recognized by the international community (with the exception of Britain and Pakistan). So Israel did not seize a territory from a recognized and legal sovereign country. Rather, Israel recovered a territory that had been granted to the Jewish people for self-determination by the Balfour Declaration (1917), by the Sèvres Treaty (1920), and by the League of Nations Mandate (1922) which was confirmed by the UN Charter in 1945. Those are binding international documents, as opposed to the 1947 Partition Plan, which was a mere recommendation (like all UN General Assembly resolutions) and which became moot the moment it was flatly rejected by the Arab League. The west bank of the Jordan River is thus a disputed, not an occupied, territory.
There are many disputed or occupied territories in the world. Yet the EU does not discriminate against products from those disputed or occupied areas.
China rules over Tibet and Xinjiang against the will of those territories’ populations. Xinjiang’s indigenous Uighurs used to constitute 90% of the province’s population sixty years ago; today they are a mere 60%. More and more Tibetans are rebelling against Chinese rule over their country: since March 2011, over 100 Tibetans have torched themselves. Uighurs and Tibetans can hardy count on the West to gain independence. China holds about $800 billion of US Government bonds, and its army constitutes a credible military threat to US allies in East Asia such as Japan and Taiwan. As for France, President Sarkozy did speak out about Tibet and even met with the Dalai-Lama. But at the G20 Summit in London in April 2009, Chinese President Hu Jintao refused to meet his French counterpart and demanded a French declaration “recognizing” that Tibet belongs to China. Sarkozy duly complied.
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