The French National Assembly’s Committee on Economic Affairs (Commission des Affaires économiques) advanced a bill on Monday banning the import of products and services from Israeli settlements.
The proposed law prohibits “commercial relations that contribute, through aid or assistance, to the policy of colonization in the occupied Palestinian territory and in the occupied Syrian territory of the Golan Heights.”
Olivier Faure of the Socialist Party is the bill’s chief sponsor, AFP reported.
“This is in no way a general sanction against Israel,” said Faure, who plans to “put an end to the financing” of what he called “an illegal activity.”
The legislation based its claim of illegality on positions taken by bodies of the United Nations. It referred specifically to France’s obligations under the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) advisory opinion of July 19, 2024.
According to the ICJ decision, “All states must co-operate with the United Nations to put into effect modalities required to ensure an end to Israel’s illegal presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and the full realization of the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”
Israel’s Foreign Ministry rejected the ICJ opinion at the time, calling it “fundamentally wrong” and “blatantly one-sided. It ignores the past: the historical rights of the State of Israel and the Jewish people in the Land of Israel.”
If passed, the bill would exact an economic price from Israel. In 2024, France was the 10th largest market for Israeli exports, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. Israel accounts for a far smaller percentage of exports for France. In 2024, it represented 0.3% of the total, making it the 42nd destination for French exports, according to France’s Ministry of Economy.
It’s not clear what percentage of Israeli exports to France come from Jewish communities in the territories. The bill claims that the European Union as a whole imports $300 million in goods annually from Israeli settlements.
The proposed law was signed by more than 100 members of parliament, according to La Chaîne Parlementaire (LCP), France’s parliamentary television and media service.
However, this does not mean that the bill will sail through the National Assembly, where it is scheduled to be debated on Nov. 19, AFP reported. The bill advanced through committee only after heated debate. On one side were left-wing legislators and the Democratic Movement (MoDem) party.
The Democratic Movement, considered a centrist party, has staked out a hostile position toward Israel. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, a member of MoDem, said in September that his country would push for fresh sanctions on Israel in connection with Judea and Samaria, including an E.U.-wide ban on products made or marketed by Israelis in the region.
MoDem is allied with French President Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, which has also been hostile to Israel in recent years but opposes the legislation, citing its disproportionate penalties and insufficiently clear legal boundaries.
Renaissance’s Sylvain Maillard criticized the bill for creating a “vague criminal risk” for French companies engaging in business with Israeli firms in the territories, AFP reported. (The bill calls for a one-year prison sentence and a fine of 5% of a company’s global annual turnover, or worldwide gross sales revenue.)
Macron’s government also prefers a coordinated E.U. approach. In April, it proposed with Sweden that the E.U. increase trade tariffs and impose stricter import controls on goods from Judea and Samaria. “With our Swedish friends, we wrote to the [European] Commission and insisted on the necessity to have a common European position on this question, rapidly,” French Minister for Foreign Trade Nicolas Forissier told Euronews in May.
Joining the Renaissance party in opposing the bill in committee was the right-wing National Rally, which condemned it as an example of the left’s “obsession with Israel.”
NGO-Monitor, a Jerusalem-based watchdog group, told JNS that a host of European countries have announced measures restricting trade and services with areas across the so-called Green Line, which separates Israel from the territories it captured in the 1967 Six-Day War, including the Old City of Jerusalem.
“France is joining the Netherlands and other European countries in what is becoming a political tsunami against Israel,” Olga Deutsch, vice president of NGO-Monitor, told JNS. “While this bill still faces a lengthy legislative process and serious legal questions given the E.U.’s authority over trade policy, its symbolic significance should deeply concern Israel. By explicitly invoking the July 2024 ICJ advisory opinion, the proposal demonstrates how seemingly isolated decisions are accumulating into a dangerous precedent and a clear trajectory in France’s approach to Israel, even if there remains hope that opposition in the National Assembly or the center-right-dominated senate can prevent the bill from becoming law.”
The banning of goods from Judea and Samaria, and in the case of the French legislation, the Golan Heights, is but a “stepping stone for a total boycott of Israel,” according to the group.
Anne Herzberg, legal adviser of NGO Monitor, told JNS: “France’s advancing of legislation to restrict trade with Israel does not promote peace, but rather prolongs conflict and disincentivizes Palestinian steps toward compromise. The proposed bill follows years of coordinated lobbying by BDS NGOs including PFP, AFPS and FIDH. It amounts to nothing more than economic warfare aimed at isolating Israel.”
The NGOs she referred to include Plateforme des ONG Françaises pour la Palestine (PFP), Association France Palestine Solidarité (AFPS), and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH). They have pushed for years for European countries to boycott Israeli settlement products.
