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Written by: Daniel Xie

On November 12, 2020, it was reported by Axios that Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of State for the outgoing Trump administration was planning to visit both the Golan Heights and an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. Both of these visits, scheduled to happen next week, would be firsts for a U.S. secretary of state. As further noted by Axios, Pompeo also plans to visit a winery in the Psagot settlement. After the announcement,the owner of the Psagot winery named a new series of wine after Pompeo and sent him a case of wine.

The winery in the Psagot settlement has been a source of major controversy, mainly because of the owner’s repeated attempts to avoid having his products labelled as originating from an Isralei settlement.. Just recently, the European Union Court of Justice has ruled that products developed in Israeli settlements must be labeled as such; it isn’t enough to label them as having been produced in Israel. This is because, according to the statement of the EU Court of Justice, labelling these products as “Made in Israel” can mislead people about the origin of these products, hiding the fact that they are made on occupied Palestinian land.

The owners of the Psagot Winery have fought efforts to have their wine labelled as originating from occupied Palestinian land. The EU ruling itself was tied by a legal challenge from Psagot Winery against guidelines published by France in 2016 saying products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights must carry labels making their precise origin clear. In response to the appeal filed by Psagot, the French court in 2018 granted Psagot’s request not to enforce the Commission’s directive on its bottles of wine, but also requested that the ECJ review the decision; this resulted in the 2019 ECJ ruling that products coming from Israeli settlements must be labeled accordingly.

In response to the ECJ ruling, Yaakov Berg, the owner of the winery, claimed that the decision amounts to Jews being once again forced to wear a “Yellow Patch”; this attempt to associate the labeling of products made in occupied Palestine with the “Star of David” used in the Nazi identification of Jews highlights that Berg sees these efforts to call attention to the true origin of Psagot winery’s products as tantamount to antisemitism. In making his trip to Berg’s winery, Pompeo sends a clear message: America stands with Yaakov Berg and his efforts to label his products ‘Made in Israel’, while condemning any efforts to punish Israel’s colonization of the West Bank as tantamount to antisemitism.

Earlier this year, Pompeo and Trump’s pro-Israel foreign policy was welcomed by the Psagot winemakers, whom unveiled a wine label named after Mike Pompeo for his announcement that Israeli settlements constructed beyond the “green line” were not illegal; repudiating a 1978 State Department legal opinion that held that civilian settlements in the territories are “inconsistent with international law”. These wines were also labelled with the hashtag #madeinlegality in an apparent jab at those seeking to label the settlements as illegal and the wine as coming from illegal settlements.

Canada Assists in defending the “Made in Israel” Label

The American government is not alone in defending the use of “Made in Israel” labels for wine originating in the West Bank. According to Canadians for Justice and Peace Vice President Michael Bueckert, the Canadian government has also sought to appeal rulings made by the Canadian Federal Court stating that labelling the wine as “Made in Isreal” is dubious and misleading.

Bueckert notes, in a tweet, that the decision of the Federal Court to label products originating in occupied Palestinian land as originating from Israeli settlements was tied to a complaint filed against the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) by David Kattenburg in 2017. Kattenburg’s complaint was in response to the CFIA’s reversal of a decision that the agency initially took regarding “Made in Israel” wine produced in the West Bank. Initially, the CFIA ordered that the wine produced in the West Bank could no longer be sold in Canada, citing issues around the labelling of a product from occupied territory in the West Bank. However, under pressure from B’nai Brith Canada, the CFIA soon retracted their decision.

In his complaint, Kattenburg asserts that such labels are incorrect as the wines in question are produced in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, or what Dr. Kattenburg calls “the Occupied Palestinian Territories”. During the proceedings of Kattenburg v. Canada, Independent Jewish Voices would support Kattenburg’s efforts to push for a re-labeling of products originating from the West Bank, while the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada, an agency operating within B’nai Brith Canada, would oppose these efforts.

On July 2019, the court ruled that the presence of Israeli settlements in the West Bank were “deeply political issues”, and the labeling of products from occupied Palestinian land as originating from occupied Palestinian land, according to the Federal Court, allows for people to make better informed decisions on where they get their products based on their politicalstances. The court in turn, allowed for a judicial review of “made in Israel labels” deemed to be “false and misleading”. A successful judicial review of the true origins of made in Israel Products could open up any products originating in the West Bank to greater scrutiny and boycott campaigns by supporters of BDS, now that they know where exactly the products they seek to boycott come from.

In addition, Bueckert notes in his observation of Kattenburg v. Canada that the Canadian Federal Judge found that falsely labelling wine from illegal settlements as "Products of Israel" infringed on the right to "freedom of expression" as protected in the Canadian Charter of Rights of Freedoms. In this case, falsely labelling products being produced on occupied Palestinian land as “Products of Israel” infringes on the freedom to boycott, as any effort to launch a boycott requires clear knowledge of where the products originated from.

The Canadian government, in response to the July ruling by the Federal Court, sought to appeal the decision. This was spurred on by various pro-Israel groups and political officials, whom claimed that the ruling by the Federal court “encouraged” BDS. In response to the government decision to appeal, Independent Jewish Voices condemned these efforts as a politically-charged attempt to appease certain pro-Israeli lobby groups and voters, while betraying the rights of Canadian citizens to make conscientious decisions about the products they choose to consume. CJPME, in their response to the appeal filed by the Canadian government, noted that Trudeau’s actions violate UN Security Council resolution 2334 which called upon states to distinguish between “the territory of the State of Israel and the territories occupied since 1967” in their diplomatic dealings with Israel.

At the same time that the Canadian government defends the labeling of products made on occupied Palestinian land as “Made in Israel”, they maintain total silence on the inability of Palestinian winemakers to sell their products in Canada. Just before the Trudeau government decided to appeal the federal court ruling on Israeli settlement products, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) informed a Palestinian company that its efforts to import Palestinian beverages are to be placed on hold due to the court ruling. While the Canadian government seeks to defend the “Made in Israel” label at the behest of wineries operating on occupied land, they have remained silent on any challenges faced by Palestinian companies to import their products into Canada.

It should be noted that Canada’s efforts to appeal the ruling of the Federal Court on “Made in Israel” wine was not the only time that Canada sought to intervene legally in Israel’s defence. On December 20, 2019, International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda sought to investigate Israeli war crimes carried out during Operation Protective Edge, and during the construction of illegal settlements. In response to this investigation, Canada threatened to intervene in the ICC investigation, claiming that the ICC has no jurisdiction to intervene in Israel because Palestine had failed to achieve statehood; this being despite the fact that 138 nations worldwide recognize Palestine as a state, and that 84 per cent of Canadians would support a possible ICC war crimes investigation into Israeli officials.

Oppose the Canadian government’s efforts to undermine BDS!

Overall, Trudeau’s efforts to oppose the ruling of the Federal Court constitutes an attempted undermining of BDS. If companies are allowed to obfuscate the true origin of products made in occupied territories, people will be less able to identify and boycott products they have a moral objection to. By seeking to reinstate the “Made in Israel” label for Psagot wine, Trudeau hinders the efforts of people sympathetic to the BDS movement.

In defending the idea that wine made in the West Bank can be labelled as “Made in Isreal”, Trudeau not only impedes efforts by BDS to call for a boycott of Psagot Wine, but further legitimitizes Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism. By calling for the reinstatement of “Made for Israel'' labels, as if the fact that they were made on occupied land is a afterthought, the Canadian government effectively sends the message that all the land in the “West bank” is effectively Israeli land and that the Palestinians who Israel seized the land from simply do not factor into the equation.

This initiative, like many foreign policy initiatives favoring Israel, are at odds with the viewpoints of the majority of Canadians, who have expressed sympathy with BDS and also believe that Israel should not be treated differently than any other nation with regards to their human rights abuses. These efforts to undermine the BDS movement must be opposed by all Canadians critical of the Israeli government’s human rights abuses.

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