The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, is expected to adopt and publish Wednesday a notice on how the member states must apply the legislation differentiating Israeli products coming from the settlements.

A measure that is likely to affect the political relations between the EU and Israel.

But an EU source told European Jewish Press (EJP) on Tuesday that the announcement of the labeling notice might be postponed by the European Commission.

EU member states will have the choice to implement or not the labeling of products manufactured in Israeli settlements in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and entering the European market. The EU considers these territories as ‘’occupied territories and the settlements as ‘’illegal under international law.’’

European Union officials call it a ‘‘strictly legal technical matter’’ while Israel slams the labeling guidelines as ‘’a boycott of all of Israel’’ and as part of a campaign to deligitimize Israel in Europe.

‘’Differentiation is not a choice for the EU. It is a legal imperative to take into account a political reality that will be addressed in the context of final status negotiations, ‘’ said Tuesday Raul Fuentes Milani, who heads the Middle East department in the EEAS, the EU’s external service.

Addressing Tuesday a conference featuring 40 years of EU-Israel ties, organised by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung and the American Jewishh Committee, the EU official recalled that settlement product are excluded from custom preferences under the EU-Israel Association Agreement. ‘’In order to ensure the implementation of this principle, a system of postal codes was set up in 2005 in agreement with Israeli authorities and has been applied successfully until now,’’ he explained.

‘’The Commission notice (to be adopted Wednesday) explains on how the member states must apply this legislation on indication of origine for the sake of EU consumers,’’ he added.

While the EU describes the labeling as being only the implementation of an existing legislation by the European Commission ‘’which has been asked by members states to do so,’’ Israel has expressed strong displeasure with the EU initiative and has recently stepped up its diplomatic efforts to persuade the EU to drop it.

EU-Israel relations, though very intense in terms of economic, scientific, technological, cultural cooperation, have been strained in recent years on the political level by the EU’s tendency to link development of these relations to the advancement of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

‘’We have a sense that the good relations that we enjoy might be affected by this poor decision (of labeling settlement products),’’ said Shuli Davidovich, Deputy Chief of Mission at Israel’s embassy to the EU.

Keynote speaker at the conference on EU-Israel ties, Italian Member of the European Parliament Fulvio Martusciello, who chairs the European Parliament delegation for relations with Israel, deplored that the EU exerts more pressure against the State of Israel than on the Palestinians. ‘’An honest broker, who wants to be honest and impartial, must be fair to both. The EU is failing to respect this role,’’ he said.

‘’The input made by the EU on the settlements issue must not jeopardize the whole relationship as the danger of making a veto right over the political progress becomes real.’’

For him the relationship between the EU and Israel ‘’is far bigger than just the settlements’’, stressing that this issue ‘’empowers those who boycott Israel.’’

‘’The current path to the EU-Israel relations is more and more negative, this is why that colleagues of good faith and sensibility should unite for a wiser political cooperation with the State of Israel,’’ Martusciello concluded.

Members of the European delegation for relations with Israel are to meet their counterparts in the Knesset in Jérusalem next week.