美国国家公共电台 NPR An Israeli-Palestinian Battle With Roots In Lingerie

An Israeli-Palestinian Battle With Roots In Lingerie

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is shifting to a financial front as Americans and Europeans raise questions about products made in Israeli-occupied areas. Europe has product labeling rules. The issue is debated in the U.S., too. NPR's Emily Harris traces the origins of the debate to an old lingerie factory in the West Bank town of Ramallah.

EMILY HARRIS, BYLINE 1: (Unintelligible) Get your exercise today.

SALWA DUIABIS: (Laughter).

HARRIS: All right, so let's go.

HARRIS: Palestinian Salwa Duiabis leads me up the stairs of what was once a lingerie factory. It's now a Ramallah office building. On the third floor, she stops. We're in the old design room.

DUIABIS: Used to have a huge cutting table. I think it was about 10 meters long.

HARRIS: That was 30 years ago.

So now there's a pingpong table here and a couple other tables and lingerie.

DUIABIS: Yes.

HARRIS: Still on hangers 2, hardly dusty are silk teddies, nightgowns, robes and slips. In 1987, lingerie made in this shop was a featured collection at the top New York department store, Bonwit Teller 3. Duiabis remembers.

DUIABIS: It made me so proud because it was a product made by Palestinians, and the Palestinians controlled every aspect of the cycle - the design, the procurement 4, the export.

HARRIS: Export especially because of the label.

DUIABIS: It gave me pride that this item of such quality, competitive, is making it to top markets in America with a label saying made in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

HARRIS: That used to be one choice of wording the U.S. allowed to label items made in the West Bank. For the Palestinians sewing slips for export at that time, the label Occupied West Bank was better than being called an Israeli factory, the default then. The man behind the lingerie factory started it as an experiment.

CHARLES SHAMAS: It was a practical laboratory, not just an investigative laboratory. We were going to try to do something nobody had done.

HARRIS: Charles Shamas is now 67 years old and living in Jerusalem. He's a Yale grad from a Lebanese-American textile family. Back in the 1980s, he wanted to document how to create good Palestinian manufacturing jobs.

SHAMAS: You had to produce a product that commanded a premium 5. You have to be able to export.

HARRIS: That's to reach wealthy Westerners. But Shamas couldn't just decide himself how to identify where the lingerie was made. Labels follow the laws of the importing countries. So he asked U.S. and European trade officials to tell him what a Palestinian factory should do.

SHAMAS: But nobody ever raised the question before. And so the Europeans never thought they had to do anything. And with the Americans, we said the same thing.

HARRIS: Here's why asking how, legally, to label lingerie Made in the West Bank was a powerful question to pose. In their foreign policy, neither the U.S. nor Europe recognizes the West Bank as part of Israel. That long-held position was taken to push for peace talks. But Shamas argued it ought to be applied 6 to product labels.

SHAMAS: We're saying you do what your understanding of your own law requires you to do.

HARRIS: In the late '80s, Shamas met Nicholas Burns who was then a U.S. diplomat 7 in Jerusalem. Burns was charged in part to help Palestinian entrepreneurs like Shamas.

NICHOLAS BURNS: Oh, I think he was one of the pioneers because until Charles came along and began to talk to foreign aid organizations and foreign governments, this was a hidden issue.

HARRIS: Burns says Shamas' efforts to get the West Bank identified as separate from Israel for the purposes of trade affected 8 more than lingerie.

BURNS: There are many Palestinian farmers in the West Bank. There are olive growers. There are orange growers. And the reality in the 1980s and 1990s was that their products were bought up by Israeli middlemen and shipped out of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as Israeli products with an Israeli label on them.

HARRIS: What words are sewn on a tiny label in a robe or stamped on a box of oranges may seem mundane 9. But former U.S. diplomat Burns compares it to the pride in a Made in America label. And from a few shipments of underwear 30 years ago, fast-forward to today and labeling is a prominent and contested issue. Officially, the U.S. no longer permits the word Israel on any product made in the West Bank or Gaza.

The European Union last year told member countries to require special labels for products from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Europe considers illegal. The European Union's ambassador to Israel, Lars Faaborg-Andersen, says the intent is to help consumers.

LARS FAABORG-ANDERSEN: In Europe, we have legislation which requires that consumers are correctly informed as to the origin of a product.

HARRIS: When the ambassador explains further, you can almost hear the logic 10 Shamas used on European officials 30 years ago, that countries should make labeling laws consistent with their foreign policy.

FAABORG-ANDERSEN: What we want to achieve with this is simply to ensure that we are abiding 11 by the legal standards that we put down ourselves. That's all there is to it.

HARRIS: The Israeli government strongly opposes this European move, saying it's part of a much larger push by outside groups to use economic pressure against Israel, even to force it out of existence. Head of Israel's Foreign Trade Administration, Ohad Cohen.

OHAD COHEN: The labeling is just one part of the big plan. It doesn't matter whether it has a minor 12 economic effect. We are not willing to take that.

HARRIS: The European rule is just starting to take effect. But Israeli settler and farmer David Elhayani says attention to the issue has already made it harder to get his dates and herbs into European shops.

DAVID ELHAYANI: If it was 80 percent goes to Europe seven and six years ago, now it's about 30 percent are going to Europe and most of our product are going now to Russia.

HARRIS: Prices are lower, and no one is making up the difference, Elhayani says.

ELHAYANI: Its affect - us And when I mean us, it's the families, the children, the growers.

HARRIS: In the U.S., rules say products from the West Bank cannot be labeled as Israeli. But Elhayani and other Israeli settlers say they have shipped that way for years. Enforcement is difficult. And now the original intent of the U.S. law is being re-examined.

DUIABIS: This is one of my favorites. I like the black chiffon (laughter).

HARRIS: Most people involved in the fight today over product labeling have never heard of that old lingerie factory in Ramallah. It closed in 1990, but the questions it raised are still at play in this conflict's ever-growing economic front. Emily Harris, NPR News, Ramallah.