Some deputies did not believe their ears, Wednesday, in the Committee on External Relations of the House.
Prime Minister Alexander De Croo has announced that Belgium is studying the possibility of outright banning products from Israeli colonies located in Palestinian territory.
These remarks aroused the enthusiasm of several members of the committee who follow the Palestinian question closely and who saw in it an appreciable change in Belgian diplomacy.
But it was actually a misunderstanding…
Thursday, the Prime Minister’s Office had to clarify its thinking, probably expressed too ambiguously in committee. No, Belgium is not advancing alone on the question of the colonies. A ban is well under study but at European level, not at Belgian level. And Belgium will line up behind any decisions of the Union in terms of trade policy. Nothing really new, then.
Malik Ben Achour (PS): “We must move towards banning these products from the colonies”
Despite these details, which he says he was surprised by, PS MP Malik Ben Achour considers that the Prime Minister has opened a door. “There is a worrying major degradation in the settlements, once morest the backdrop of Israeli political and security radicalization, analyzes the elected socialist. The current sequence is significant: forced displacement of hundreds of Palestinians, assassination of a journalist who takes a bullet in the head, attack on her funeral procession in an undignified manner, 70,000 Israeli ultranationalists who cross Jerusalem shouting ‘death to the Arabs’… It is essential for the Europeans, led by Belgium, which must set an example, to take action. The labeling of products from the settlements is provided for in the government agreement and would already be a good thing. But this is insufficient. We must move towards banning these products.“
Will this sensitive question rebound within the federal majority of which the PS is a part?
