French Cookware Firm Scraps ‘Palestine’ Label
The French kitchenware maker Tefal removed references to “Palestine” from three of its websites following earlier complaints over Israel’s omission from them.
The removal of “Palestine” from the Middle East versions of the firm’s website seems to have occurred sometime this week, following a publication by the news site lemondejuif.info, which reported that Tefal had omitted its Israeli resellers from the online lists of its Middle East service providers while it kept references to “Palestine.”
A Tefal representative told JTA on Friday that Israel’s omission from the firm’s Middle East websites in English, French and Farsi was the result of a “technical problem that had been fixed.”
The websites on Friday still made no mention of Israel but had been altered to omit any reference also to “Palestine,” as cached versions of the same websites showed.
Tefal’s international website in English does mention Israel. It also lists a reseller based in east Jerusalem as its representative in the Palestinian Territories.
Approached for a reaction by JTA on Friday, Caroline Simon, a representative of the SEB Group which owns the Tefal brand, denied allegations that the website had replaced Israel with “Palestine,” as the lemondejuif news site claimed.
“We had a technical problem in one of our scroll-down menus. Israel was removed or didn’t appear, as it should have. We are sorry for this malfunction, which was fixed as soon as it was brought to our attention,” Simon said.
She was not immediately available for comment on further questions as to why neither Israel nor “Palestine” currently appear on the Middle East versions of the company’s website.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO