Americans for Peace Now (APN) strongly condemns an initiative by four Republican Senators to label products made in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank as being “Made in Israel.” 

The four, Tom Cotton (AR), Kelly Loeffler (GA), Marco Rubio (FL), and Ted Cruz (TX), sent a letter Monday to outgoing President Trump, with copies to the Secretaries of State, the Treasury, and Homeland Security, urging Trump to allow “Israeli goods produced in Judea and Samaria to be labeled as ‘Made in Israel.’” Judea and Samaria is the biblical term used by Israeli religious nationalists and their supporters to refer to the West Bank.

Commenting on this initiative, APN’s President and CEO Hadar Susskind said: “The West Bank is not a part of Israel and therefore Israeli products made there are not made in Israel. Rather, they are made in an occupied territory, held by Israel under military rule, pending a political agreement regarding its future. If it were up to these four senators, who presume to be friends of Israel, these territories would become a part of the sovereign state of Israel, forcing Israelis to choose between becoming an undemocratic apartheid state and becoming a bi-national state that is no longer Jewish. Conflating Israel with an occupied territory is not pro-Israel. It’s pro-apartheid. Differentiating between Israel and the West Bank, which – thankfully – is not a part of sovereign Israel, leaves a path to a two-state Israeli-Palestinian peace, which is the only path for Israel to be a secure, democratic, national homeland of the Jewish people.”