The EU Ambassador to Israel Lars Faaborg-Andersen. Photo: EU Delegation to Israel.

The European Union’s Ambassador to Israel asserted at a conference on Wednesday that calling the labeling of Judea-Samaria, east Jerusalem and Golan Heights products a “boycott” was inaccurate, Israeli daily Maariv reported.

Referring to a recent EU decision to no longer allow products from the disputed territories to be labeled as from Israel, Lars Faaborg-Andersen told an audience at the Jerusalem Post Diplomatic Conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in the Israeli capital, that Europe was neither boycotting Israel nor the settlements. “Don’t confuse fact with fiction,” he said.

He also expressed shock at the claims of antisemitism over the EU decision and the comparison of it to the Nazi policy of labeling Jewish businesses, calling it “insulting to the memory of the Holocaust.”

In addition, according to Maariv, Faaborg-Andersen questioned how Europe, “a partner and a friend,” could be accused of boycotting Israel when it was investing millions of euros in the country, noting that since Britain introduced the labeling of Israeli settlement products, trade between the two countries had doubled.