Iceland: Reykjavik passes law boycotting all Israeli products.

Jewish Press reports:

Reykjavik, Iceland passed a law boycotting all Israeli products. Both Israel and Iceland are parties to an international trade treaty which bans such boycotts.


The 15-member City Council passed a motion banning the city of Reykjavik from purchasing any goods made in Israel. Reykjavik went whole hog – all Israeli goods were banned under its new law, not just goods made or grown beyond the “Green Line.” The measure was passed by a majority of the City Council on Tuesday, Sept. 15.

The motion was sponsored by retiring Councillor Björk Vilhelmsdóttir, of the center-left Social Democrats. The motion was introduced in 2014, as a response to that summer’s conflict between Hamas and Israel. Vilhelmsdóttir also encouraged individuals to boycott all Israeli goods.  The preamble to the new law states that the City of Reykjavik will not purchase any goods from Israel so long as that country “occupies Palestinian territories.”

In the opinion of the Reykjavik City Council, Israel deserves to be slapped – at least symbolically – for “violating international agreements” and for treating Palestinian Arabs with a form of Apartheid, akin to South Africa.

Vilhelmsdóttir claims neither she nor her legislative action have anything to do with anti-Semitism, and neither are opposed to Israel, merely to the current government of Israel.

The councillor’s husband, Sveinn Runar Hauksson, is the head of the Iceland-Palestine Association.

On the Councillor’s Facebook page, she features a picture of two young girls holding a huge poster of a man with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanuyahu’s head on the body of a Nazi officer.

Although most photographs of Hauksson show him wearing a kefiyah expressing allegiance to Fatah, his Facebook page boasts a picture of him in 2010 handing an award to the then-Prime Minister of Gaza and head of Hamas, Ismail Haniyeh.

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