June 08, 2006

In vino veritas?

Here's an article in Ynet (Yediot Ahranot) about how the Swedish authorities are marking wine from the occupied Syrian Golan Heights as being from, er, the occupied Syrian Golan Heights. Israel isn't happy with this simple statement of fact.
Sweden's state alcohol retail monopoly has recently decided to market wines produced in the Israel Golan Heights as made in "Syrian occupied territory." The shelves carrying the kosher wine had previously labeled it as coming from Israel, but the Systembolaget monopoly recently changed the labels.

"Many of our customers believe that the Golan Heights do not belong to the State of Israel according to international law. we have approached the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm in order to consult about how to define the origin of the wine in our catalogue," a spokesman for the state company explained.

The Foreign Ministry confirmed the report, but stated it had no involvement in the company's final decision regarding how to refer to the wine's production site in its stores.

Christian Democrat parliamentarian Annelia Enochson called the decision "very disturbing", and said that it was tantamount to "unfair special treatment of Israel."
Actually calling the territory "Syrian occupied" rather than "occupied Syrian" looks unfair to Syria to me.

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