A legal group is now disputing against the United States Customs for reissuing of orders to strictly impose labelling of all products from Judea and Samaria as not from Israel. Legal Grounds, a group established to promote Israeli rights based on international law, argued that the announcement indicated a policy shift.
According to Arutz Sheva Israel National News, the US State Department defended the report of the US Customs, saying that it was not a new policy, but rather a call to enforce the decision in 1995 to mark the goods imported from the region. Legal Grounds co-chair Arlene Kushner responded to the announcement, saying that the existing policy was not simply a reissue of orders but a rather a re-interpretation of the original memorandum. The group further contended that in 1995, then-President Bill Clinton issued a presidential proclamation that implicitly indicated that products from Jewish towns in Samaria and Judea will be identified as originating in Israel. The reissued policy stated that all good from the regions mentioned above will be marked as coming from "West Bank".
US Ambassador for Israel Ron Dermer used the embassy's holiday gift giving to send items made in Golan Heights and "West Bank" to counter a growing population of new anti-Semitism to the Jewish state, as reported by Newsweek. The ambassador mainly pointed to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a group sponsored by anti-Semitic intellectuals and bloggers, which are campaigning for the ban on all goods coming from Israel and many other anti-Jews activities.
As stated in Yahoo! News, Dermer posted a photo on Twitter last December showing packages consisting of Israeli goods expressing his protests in the recent issue of a double standard to Jewish areas and added that Israel prides itself on giving high democratic standards to women, gays and Christians.
The European Union also recently created guidelines for labelling products made in Samaria and Judea in a different name other than those that were made in Israel. Dermer added that out of 200 unresolved territorial conflicts in the world, the Union decided to Jewish products deserved to be labelled as something else.
