Such labeling is common practice in Europe. The 15-nation European Union (Norway is not a member) requires that all Israeli goods be marked as such, even though Israel enjoys preferential trade status with the EU. Imports from anywhere outside the EU are supposed to display their country of origin. The EU’s toothless “legislature,” the European Parliament, voted a few weeks ago to call for a suspension of Israel’s preferential status, but the real governing body, the Council of the European Commission, just shrugged at the resolution. “No one really thought it would be done,” a Parliament official says.
Boycotts can backfire. Take the Norwegian supermarkets’ threat to pull Israeli products off their shelves. “It’s ironic, because if you try to harm Israeli fruit and vegetable exports, you are actually harming Palestinians,” says Ohad Cohen, Israel’s commercial attache to Norway, Sweden and Finland. “Most people who work in that sector are Palestinians or foreigners”–that is, migrant farmhands from places like Thailand.
There’s also the troublesome case of two Israeli professors fired recently in the name of an academic boycott against Israel. Both were on the staffs of scholarly journals published at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, in England. A win for Palestinian rights? Hardly. One of the two, translation-studies specialist Miriam Shlesinger, was chairperson of Amnesty International’s Israel branch and is active in the Israeli antiwar group Peace Now. In short, the only rule that applies to Mideast politics is the law of unforeseen consequences.
