GREAT BAY--The Netherlands has asked St. Maarten, Curaçao and Aruba to consider adopting their own bans on goods produced in unlawful Israeli settlements, but turning that request into an enforceable local policy would require considerably more than adding Israel to a list of restricted trading partners.
The Dutch measure, which takes effect on September 22, 2026, does not prohibit all Israeli products. It applies only to goods obtained or produced wholly or partly in settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the occupied Golan Heights. Purchases, sales, brokerage services and deliberate attempts to bypass the ban will also be prohibited.
That creates the central enforcement problem for St. Maarten. Authorities would not simply be looking for a label stating “Made in Israel.” They would have to establish where within the territory controlled by Israel a product was grown, manufactured or processed, including whether it contains ingredients or components originating in a settlement.
The Dutch request therefore presents St. Maarten with two separate decisions. Government must first determine whether it supports the ban as part of a common Kingdom foreign policy. It must then decide whether it can create an enforcement system capable of separating lawful Israeli goods from products connected to settlements without placing an unworkable burden on authorities and local businesses.
How the Netherlands intends to track the goods
The Dutch system will rely heavily on a European Union list containing the locations and postal codes of Israeli settlements. Israeli certificates of origin already include the postal code of the place of production because goods from settlements are excluded from the preferential tariff treatment granted to products originating within Israel’s internationally recognized borders.
The list has two sections. Postal codes in the first section are directly associated with locations outside Israel’s pre-1967 borders. Postal codes in the second require closer examination to determine whether the specific address falls inside Israel or within occupied territory. Dutch Customs and the Fiscal Intelligence and Investigation Service may seek assistance from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when a location requires further verification.
Importers handling goods originating in Israel will be required to declare that the goods do not come from an unlawful settlement. The declaration will become part of the customs entry, while importers must maintain records that can be examined during later checks. Customs will supervise goods at the border, while the Fiscal Intelligence and Investigation Service and the Public Prosecution Service will handle possible criminal violations involving purchases, sales, brokerage and circumvention.
For Bonaire, St. Eustatius and Saba, the Dutch government has specifically assigned import supervision to Customs Caribbean Netherlands. The same ban will therefore apply at their ports, airports, postal facilities and courier services, even though the three islands fall outside the European Union’s customs territory.
Transit will remain permitted. Goods merely passing through Dutch territory for another destination will not be prohibited because they are not entering the Dutch market, and the government concluded that a transit ban would be difficult to enforce.
The Dutch system is not foolproof
The Netherlands has acknowledged that the process will be difficult. The Dutch Council of State, Customs, the Fiscal Intelligence and Investigation Service and the Public Prosecution Service all raised questions about whether authorities can reliably establish the precise origin of every product.
Goods may be mixed with products from inside Israel, processed in another country or shipped through a third jurisdiction. Documentation may identify Israel as the country of origin without clearly identifying the farm, factory or processing facility. Goods can also enter through another market before being resold, making the final port of shipment different from the true place of production.
These difficulties would be equally relevant, and possibly greater, in St. Maarten. A shipment arriving from a distributor in Miami, Curaçao or the Netherlands would not necessarily reveal whether one product inside the container was originally manufactured in a settlement. The country from which a container was shipped is not always the country where every item inside it was produced.
What St. Maarten would have to establish
The Dutch measure does not automatically apply in St. Maarten because the Dutch Sanctions Act is not a Kingdom law. St. Maarten has its own Sanctions National Ordinance and related regulations, which provide a legal mechanism for introducing restrictive measures against states, territories, people and organizations. A settlement-goods ban would therefore require a specific local decision defining the prohibited goods, the responsible authorities, the documentation required and the penalties for violations.
A new settlement ban would therefore require a clear administrative system for identifying and recording affected commercial shipments, rather than relying solely on an existing broad tariff-assessment process. A workable local system would likely have to require importers to provide the commercial invoice, manufacturer’s address, certificate of origin, bill of lading, packing list and a supplier declaration for goods connected to Israel. The place of manufacture and its postal code would be more important than the location of the distributor or shipping warehouse.
The law would also have to cover indirect imports. A product should not escape examination merely because it was purchased through a wholesaler in the United States or Europe. Importers would need to trace the product back to its producer, not simply identify the last company that handled it.
Border checks alone would also be insufficient. Because the Dutch model prohibits purchasing and selling the goods, local authorities would need to inspect wholesalers, supermarkets, pharmacies, specialty stores and other businesses after products have entered the market.
What the available trade data show
No current public dataset was found showing the value or volume of goods imported directly from Israel into St. Maarten, Bonaire, St. Eustatius or Saba by individual product and place of production.
CBS publishes import totals for Bonaire, St. Eustatius and Saba, including broad product categories and total trade values. Its public Caribbean Netherlands tables do not provide the settlement-level or postal-code information needed to enforce the ban. CBS compiles its trade figures from customs declarations submitted by companies, but the published figures are designed for statistical analysis, not the tracing of individual shipments.
St. Maarten’s Department of Statistics uses international classifications for merchandise imports and exports, but no recent publicly available table was located that identifies imports from Israel. Even a country-level total would not answer the main question because trade statistics generally record products under a country and commodity code, not the street address or postal code of the factory where they were produced.
A product could also reach St. Maarten through a third-country distributor and appear in shipping records as arriving from that country. Aggregate trade figures might therefore understate the presence of Israeli products or fail to identify goods containing materials originating in settlements.
Enforcement would depend on paperwork
St. Maarten could enforce such a ban, but it would have to build the system around transaction-level documentation rather than national import totals.
The practical starting point would be a mandatory declaration for relevant importers, linked to the EU settlement postcode list. Government would then need a risk-based inspection system, record-retention requirements, market checks and a process for requesting additional information from the Netherlands when an address is unclear.
The government would also have to tell businesses what happens when the documentation is incomplete. Goods could be detained while their origin is verified, returned to the supplier or seized when an importer knowingly provides false information. The law would need to distinguish between an honest documentation error and an intentional effort to hide a product’s origin.
The absence of visible direct trade with Israel would not make the issue irrelevant, but it could influence how much enforcement capacity St. Maarten should dedicate to it. Before adopting the measure, government could ask Customs and major importers to conduct a review of products of Israeli origin currently entering the market, including goods obtained through third-country suppliers.
The Netherlands has provided a model, but it has also acknowledged the model’s limitations. For St. Maarten, adopting the principle would be the easier part. Establishing where every affected product truly came from would be the real test.
The French connection
Then, of course, there is the fact that St. Maarten has an open border with French St. Martin. France does not currently have a national ban in force on products from Israeli settlements.
France supports such a restriction and has been urging the European Union to adopt one. In June 2026, the French Foreign Ministry said the government favored prohibiting settlement products in France, but argued that an effective measure should be introduced at EU level because France is part of the European single market.
France and Sweden have also asked the European Commission to consider an EU-wide import ban. EU ministers discussed several options in July, including licensing requirements, very high tariffs and a complete prohibition, but no agreement was reached.
