The EU has been asked Palestine to blacklist violent Jewish settlers as “terrorists”. Israel has immediately called Palestine’s move “a PR stunt”. The Palestinian foreign minister, Riad Malki, has recently written to Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, to complain about settler groups, called “price tag” and “hilltop youth”, that are attacking people in the West Bank to “forcibly transfer them away from their land and homes”. In his words, there has been a “sharp increase” in incidents that he refers to as “price tags”, since they are intended to exact a price for anti-settler activities. To that end, Mr Malki blamed the Israeli army for giving “protection” to those individuals who “in the last month alone, [were involved in] vandalizing Muslim and Christian cemeteries, beating children, attacking women with pepper spray, launching raids against villages, inscribing racist graffiti, torching cars.”
Palestinian foreign minister has called on Ms Ashton “to take the only decision possible as regards ‘price tag’ and ‘hill-top youth’ by considering them as terrorist groups, with all the political, legal, and financial implications such a decision holds.” The official EU black-lists are issued every six months, based on deliberations of the Member States’ intelligence officers and interior ministry officials in Brussels. While the February list included eight Palestinian entities, including Hamas, if a Jewish group eventually appeared on the EU black-list, it would represent a major change in EU’s approach to Middle East politics, after more than five decades in which “terrorism” has been used to label exclusively Arab actions.
