From AFP:
Several hundreds of people staged a protest march in Pretoria on Thursday against South Africa's plans to stick "Made in the Palestinian Territories" labels on goods from the area.The proposed law for labeling only those Judea and Samaria goods made by Jewish companies is itself a model of how ignorant people are of history.
Around 300 members of the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) and the Inkatha Freedom party marched peacefully and handed over a petition against the labelling to the Ministry of Trade and Industry, ministry spokesman Sidwell Medupe told AFP.
South Africa's Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies has argued that consumers must be informed of a product's origin, as is common practice in other parts of the world, including the European Union.
Reverend Kenneth Meshoe, leader of the ACDP argued however that "the South African government must not involve itself in the political agenda of organisations and anti-Israeli lobbies."
The government has issued a notice of intention to introduce "Made in Palestinian Territories" tags and will make a decision after a public consultation process that ends on July 10.
It includes this statement:
"The government of South Africa recognises the state of Israel only within the borders demarcated by the United Nations in 1948. Such demarcated borders of Israel by the UN do not include Palestinian territories occupied after 1967."
There were no borders demarcated by the United Nations in 1948.
The UN proposed a partition resolution where a Jewish State would exist alongside an Arab State in 1947, but that resolution was never implemented as it wasn't accepted by any Arab nation, who decided to destroy Israel instead. That resolution is not international law. Israel's legal basis is not UNGA 181 but the fact that Jewish nationalists survived and won a war waged against them meant to exterminate their presence in Palestine. (This is without going into the legal basis of the League of Nations' action in 1922 supporting a Jewish homeland in all of Palestine west of the Jordan, partitioning off eastern Palestine into the new entity called Transjordan for the Arabs.)
The lines that became what is incorrectly called "Israel's 1967 borders" were armistice lines that were agreed upon between Israel and the Arab nations, under UN oversight, in separate negotiations in 1948 and 1949.
In fact, UNSC 242 notes this by saying that there must be "secure and recognized borders" between Israel and the Arab world.
So which "borders" are South Africa referring to?
