But what happens when such deception becomes part of a state-backed project that breaches international law? Apparently, not much.
Israel’s two biggest trading partners, the European Union and the United States, have shown a remarkable tolerance for settlement products that are falsely labelled before entering international markets.
An explosive new report by the Global Echo Litigation Center exposes how products from Israeli settlements are being systematically mislabelled to fraudulently gain tariff advantages, highlighting urgent ethical and legal concerns.
For years, it’s been widely known that Israel exports products, chiefly agricultural, from its settlements on the West Bank and the Golan Heights under a “Made in Israel” label.
It does so even though it is legally required by the European Union and the United Kingdom to label such products as being from settlements.
The goal of such labelling is not merely to avoid higher tariffs, but also to increase the products’ marketability.
As a 2019 European Court of Justice ruling in the case of wine sold by a company located in both France and a West Bank settlement (known as the Psagot case) explained, “In all cases, the indication of country of origin or place of provenance should be provided in a manner which does not deceive the consumer …”
In other words, it’s not only a matter of international law.
The ECJ said consumers have the right to decide what their purchasing power supports and, therefore, the right to be informed about the source of the imports they buy.
Yet the open secret of Israel exporting settlement products as if they were made within Israel’s internationally recognised boundaries clouds those decisions. It has been especially tricky because the accusation has been difficult to prove conclusively.
That’s why Global Echo’s report is so important.
“We have now confirmed suspicions raised by Palestinian and international groups for decades: settlement goods are unlawfully entering European markets in large numbers,” said Emily Schaeffer Omer-Man, international human rights lawyer and executive director of Global Echo.
According to the report:
Under EU and UK laws, food products from illegal Israeli settlements should not receive tax breaks, plant passports, or organic certification, and they must not be on supermarket shelves marked as Product of Israel. Now we know how settlement producers, packers, and exporters regularly subvert and undermine these laws. These practices violate European consumers’ and producers’ rights, and Palestinians pay the highest price.
How Settlement Products Are Disguised as “Made in Israel”
Global Echo identifies three main methods of deception.
“Hiding in Plain Sight”: Exporters list the correct production location in occupied territory but describe the country of origin as “Israel”.
This practice is most concerning because it is permitted under the EU-Israel Technical Agreement.
While the EU–Israel Technical Agreement does not formally extend preferential treatment to goods produced in Israeli settlements, it effectively shifts responsibility for identifying and excluding such goods to EU member states.
Under the arrangement, Israeli exporters provide the relevant address information on customs forms and invoices while continuing to label the goods as originating from “Israel.”
Unless customs authorities or importers scrutinise this information and determine that the goods originate in settlements in the occupied West Bank or the Golan Heights, the products enter the European market as Israeli goods and enjoy the benefits of preferential trade treatment.
In practice, the agreement creates a significant loophole. Rather than preventing settlement products from benefiting from the EU–Israel trade regime, it relies on EU authorities to detect and challenge their origin.
As a result, settlement goods can reach European consumers under an Israeli label, allowing settlement businesses to benefit from trade preferences while obscuring the products’ connection to occupied territory.
Critics contend that this arrangement not only undermines the EU’s stated distinction between Israel and the settlements but also makes the EU complicit in misleading consumers about the origins of the goods they purchase.
“Sham Address”: Exporters use a false address inside Israel’s sovereign territory instead of the real settlement location in occupied territory.
This method is a more direct violation of the trade agreements. It involves using an address—sometimes one associated with the company, such as its business office or a packing plant, and at other times an unrelated address—that falls within the 1948 boundaries rather than the actual point of origin of the goods.
“Mingling”: Israeli packing houses mix settlement goods with goods from Israel, which are then exported together under Israeli origin.
Upon examining more than 5,900 ostensibly Israeli shipments of fresh produce from 2017 to 2026, Global Echo found that 1 in 6 (17.2%) of shipments to the EU, UK, Norway, and Switzerland originated in settlements.
Because the deceptive practices are so widespread, Global Echo believes the true scale of the problem is likely higher.
Relevance in a Post-Oslo Environment
Global Echo’s report hinges on the issue of differentiation: the practice of distinguishing between the Israeli settlements in occupied territory and Israel within its internationally recognised borders.
But in a world where people increasingly question the feasibility of a two-state solution, does it really matter?
In other words, are the settlements now a fact on the ground that we must account for in the quest for justice in Palestine?
Global Echo’s report makes a strong case to the contrary:
Differentiation’s failure not only facilitates persistent non-compliance by Israel and Israeli economic actors, but it materially contributes to the economic viability and expansion of the settlement enterprise, including the accelerating appropriation of land in Area C of the West Bank. As Israel’s current Minister of Finance (Bezalel Smotrich) has openly stated, ‘we are erasing the Green Line through agriculture in Judea and Samaria.’
Whatever solution is ultimately reached in a future currently unimaginable, the settlement project continues to facilitate Palestinian dispossession in the West Bank and to entrench Israeli control of the occupied Golan Heights.
Agricultural projects in both territories have played and continue to play a central role in advancing Israel’s illegal activities.
They spawn the violent pogroms in the West Bank, as settlers constantly endeavour to chase Palestinians off their lands both for reasons of ethno-nationalist hatred and for the desire to expand the potential for their settlements’ own agricultural output.
In the Golan Heights, the breakdown of differentiation has greatly accelerated the normalisation of Israel’s occupation of the Syrian territory captured in 1967, and even the expansion of Israel’s occupation deeper into Syria in the wake of the fall of the government of Bashar al-Asad.
While the United States is the only country to recognise Israel’s sovereignty over the part of the Golan captured in 1967, there is rarely much thought given to the disposition of the occupied Syrian lands.
Israel’s occupation of Syria has become, for Israelis, Europeans and Americans, a de facto reality.
Washington’s Position
It makes sense that Global Echo targets the EU, as it is Israel’s biggest trading partner, accounting for some 30% of Israeli exports. But the United States is obviously an important partner as well.
Washington, however, has very different rules for trade with settlements. In fact, the White House demonstrates the dangers of ignoring differentiation.
At the end of Trump’s first term in 2020, a Federal Register Notice from US Customs and Border Protection amended government labelling requirements for West Bank imports. Rather than distinguishing between Israeli and Palestinian jurisdictions, the policy required goods from Israeli-controlled areas to be marked “Made in Israel”.
Thus, goods made by Palestinian firms in the West Bank are labelled accordingly, while products from the settlements are labelled “Made in Israel”. This was part of a broader American push that successfully blurred the line between Israel and the settlements and granted the settlements protections similar to those afforded to Israel.
Legitimising settlements is as deadly to a one-state solution, or even a confederation, as it was to the two-state solution. That fact is not lost on Israeli leaders, who erase the distinction as part of an ongoing, slow annexation of the West Bank.
Consider the words of Eugene Kontorovich, past and present.
A far-right law professor and leading apologist for Israeli crimes, in 2019, Kontorovich argued that the ECJ decision in the Psagot case was
… not about consumer protection; it is about adopting a unique legal standard for the Jewish state. The EU labels for these Jewish products are also unique among all product labelling in that they are not geographic — they are not about ‘where’ something was made but by ‘whom’.
Notably, Kontorovich voiced no objection to the US rules that defined products by who made them, not where they were made.
At that time, I debunked Kontorovich’s argument by pointing out numerous instances of legal decisions based on specific cases in certain countries, including Russia in Crimea, Morocco in Western Sahara, and other examples.
Kontorovich complained that the Israeli settlements were singled out, while similar cases were ignored.
While his argument was faulty, the important point here is that he did not argue that the settlements themselves were just as much a part of Israel as Tel Aviv, although his arguments on this and other issues certainly imply that he believed so.
But now, after years of normalising the erasure of differentiation between Israel and the settlements, Kontorovich makes a different argument.
Just this week, he co-authored an article where he argued, “Based on spurious “accusations and bogus legal reasoning, the Biden Administration, and now the European Union, turned the very idea of Jews living in the West Bank into a sanctionable offence and an inherent violation of Palestinian human rights”.
The argument is even more absurd this time around, as Kontorovich tries to make the case that Israel is legally entitled to occupy land, confiscate it from its rightful owners, and repopulate it with its own citizens.
This is, of course, a clear violation of international law, but for our purposes the point is that it reflects the outcome of normalising the lack of distinction between Israel and the territories it occupies.
That is the inevitable result of the system under which the United States operates, and which Israel and its supporters want adopted in the European Union, the United Kingdom and everywhere.
That is the breach Global Echo has stepped into, and the legal issue they hope to address while there is still time.
Europe’s adherence to its laws distinguishing between products from Israel and those from its settlements is more than a legal nicety.
It speaks to the very basis of Palestinians’ case against Israel for their dispossession and the ongoing violation of their most basic rights.
Photograph courtesy of Jillian C. York. Published under a Creative Commons license.
