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Europe Joins the Boycott Israel Crowd
(Wall Street Journal) Editorial - Britain has banned imports of Israeli goods from the West Bank, eastern Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, plus sanctions on anyone facilitating new construction. France and Canada plan similar measures. That's curious. If Israeli communities were the issue, Israel's removal of every community from Gaza in 2005 should have helped. Instead Gazans voted in Hamas. The Palestinians have been destroying the two-state solution by showing Israel that any territory it relinquishes will be used to launch wars and pogroms. Israel offered the Palestinians a state in the West Bank and Gaza in 2000-01. They turned it down and launched a terrorist intifada, then rejected it again in 2008. What Palestinians keep saying, but the likes of Mr. Miliband refuse to hear, is that they won't live in peace alongside a Jewish state even in Tel Aviv, which they consider a settlement. Yet Britain, Canada and France have only carrots for the Palestinian side. They subsidize the Palestinian Authority, a dictatorship that still awards "pay-for-slay" salaries to terrorists who murder Jews. The sanctions' impetus is supposedly Israel's plan to build in E1, an area in the Jerusalem suburbs. This is an excuse - E1 stayed Israeli in the 2000 peace proposal negotiated by Bill Clinton. This is an attack on Israel, its economy and sovereignty, as a whole. Any Israeli bank that finances a mortgage for a Jew in eastern Jerusalem or its suburbs could now face sanctions. It also threatens U.S. firms. Under federal law warding off foreign coercion, U.S. firms are forbidden from cooperating with such a boycott. It's the European way by now: The Palestinians start wars they lose and won't make peace, but the Europeans punish Israel to pressure it to make land-for-war concessions anyway.