UK
Boycotting Israeli Products – Our Campaign to get the Co-op to do the Right Thing
By Paul Neill, Palestine Solidarity Campaign
There have been ongoing campaigns over many years aimed at persuading supermarket shoppers to stop buying Israeli products. These have had limited success, and you will still find plenty of Israeli avocados, hummus, and even potatoes and carrots on the shelves of your local Tesco or Sainsbury’s.
I am one of a small group of Palestine solidarity activists in West Yorkshire, who want to go further and have led a campaign to get a supermarket – the Co-op – to boycott Israeli products. We have submitted Motion 13, an individual members’ motion signed by Co-op members across the UK, to the Co-op’s 2025 AGM, asking them “to demonstrate fairness and consistency in its ethical decision-making, and cease all trading with Israel.”
The Co-op was one of the very first retailers to boycott Russian products, exactly seven days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, stating that “In response to the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces and as a sign of solidarity with the people of Ukraine, we have taken the decision to remove from sale Russian-made vodka.” Yet, it has refused to take similar action during the 580 days (and counting) of Israel’s bombardment and total destruction of Gaza.
Three of the most respected human rights organisations – Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, and Médecins Sans Frontières – have produced reports that conclude that Israel has committed genocide. The International Criminal Court has issued international arrest warrants for the Prime Minister and Former Defence Minister of Israel for ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’. We can add forced starvation and ethnic cleansing in Gaza to the list of war crimes committed by Israel since we submitted our motion to the Co-op in early March.
To their credit, the Co-op no longer sources products that are believed to come from the illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. We would argue, however, that to continue to buy products from the country that created the settlements and continues to expand them makes no sense from an ethical point of view. This is a permanent occupation. The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel’s laws in the occupied territories are “tantamount to apartheid”.
- There are now 700,000 illegal settlers on Palestinian land and Israel has announced plans to build nearly 1200 more settler homes in 2025;
- There are two systems of law – Israeli settlers are subject to civilian law, Palestinians to military law;
- Israel controls all water supplies in the West Bank. Only 36% of Palestinians receive running water every day, and settlers use 3 times more water per person than Palestinians. Many Palestinian communities have to buy water to make up for the shortfall in supply or because Israel nearly always refuses requests to drill water wells or connect to the mains supply;
- Armed settlers, protected by the Israeli military, are free to roam outside their settlements:
- to graze their flocks on Palestinian farmland;
- to burn swathes of Palestinian agricultural land and, to date, destroy 800,000 olive trees;
- routinely attack Palestinian communities, killing and injuring civilians, and burning down homes. These attacks have increased by 30% in the first 3 months of 2025;
Israel has pursued a long-term policy of ethnic cleansing in the occupied territories. In 2024, nearly 1800 Palestinian-owned buildings were demolished and, since January 2025, 40,000 Palestinians have been forcibly expelled from three refugee camps in the West Bank, with the army instructed to stay in the camps for the next year “to prevent the return of residents”.
The Co-op, as part of the wider co-operative movement, has a proud history as an ethical organisation. It is, to use the business jargon, one of its ‘unique selling points’ as a high street supermarket and why many of its 5.5 million members joined the Co-op. It clearly felt there was a moral imperative that required them to stop trading with Russia. We can think of no greater moral imperative than to oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its military occupation and apartheid regime in the Occupied Territories.
The Co-op states that “We’re run by our members. And when you’re owned by the people, you can do right by the people.” It has an opportunity to do right by its members and be on the right side of history by, as our motion states, showing “moral courage and leadership” on this issue.
Any Co-op member who spent more than £100 in 2024 is eligible to vote at the AGM, and should have received an email or postal pack in the past 2-3 weeks inviting them to vote online by noon on 12th May 2025 or in person at the AGM on 17th May 2025. Motion 13, along with the Co-op Board’s response to it, can be found here.
A simple majority is required to pass the motion. A decisive vote in favour of Motion 13 could lead to the Co-op being the first high street supermarket to stop selling Israeli goods, which would be a huge victory for the wider Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
- Paul Neill is one of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign activists involved in getting the motion tabled at the Co-op’s AGM.
- The Palestine Solidarity Campaign are holding a National Demo on the 77th anniversary of the 1948 Nakba, to demand that the Government take action to end the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The demo is assembling at Embankment Tube, London on 17th May from 12PM.
- You can follow the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram and Bluesky.
Palestine Solidarity: United, Defiant, Focused
By Leila Ryan
Following the International Court of Justice’s finding that Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza amounts to plausible genocide, the International Criminal Court, last November, issued unprecedented arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant. Neither has yet been detained and they are clearly expecting friends in high places will shield them from justice.
Complicity with Israel
The genocidal onslaught lasted from 8 October 2023 to 19 January 2025, the day before their most powerful friend, President Trump, was inaugurated in Washington. The subsequent ceasefire could have been agreed as early as May 2024 had Netanyahu and his Western backers not preferred ongoing genocide instead.
At the time of writing (4 March 2025), Israel and its US sponsor seem to be bringing the ceasefire to an abrupt end, opening the way to the completion of the genocide either by resuming direct military assaults or doubling down on the other war crimes of starving Gazans into submission and forcing them off their land.
Israel’s genocidal actions from October 2023 to early 2025 were so dependent on Western military, diplomatic and propaganda cover that the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands (and possibly other countries) amply deserve prosecution alongside Israel itself, even if some alternative strategy – or renewed global outrage – halted the genocide altogether.
There should also be room in the dock for Poland, which has NATO’s biggest army in Europe. On 27 January 2025 (Holocaust Remembrance Day), in a serious case of obstructing the course of justice, the Polish government gave Netanyahu immunity from arrest so he could attend the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. By inviting Netanyahu, the butcher of Gaza, the Polish government insulted the memory of the nearly 47,000 Palestinians killed up to that time in the Gaza genocide. As if that were not insulting enough, it also failed to invite any Russian representative to the anniversary event, thereby also insulting the memory of the 600,000 Soviet Red Army troops who gave their lives freeing Poland from Nazi invaders and liberating Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945.
Accountability for genocide
The Gaza genocide was the most intense and large-scale slaughter and displacement of Palestinians since the original Nakba (“catastrophe”) or ethnic cleansing, on which Israel was founded as a settler colony back in 1948. The global and almost 24/7 coverage of what Israel did to Gaza in 2023-2025 makes it the first genocide to be live streamed on social media. It cannot now be wiped from the collective memory of mankind.
Those responsible for any state’s complicity with genocidal Israel are now being targeted in campaigns by their fellow citizens and others. Beyond and within nation-states, transnational corporations and public bodies will be coming under closer scrutiny than ever for evidence of complicity with apartheid at best and genocide and other war crimes at worst.
The ICC’s evidence against prominent perpetrators Netanyahu and Gallant is already in the public domain but others are also being pursued. Campaigners in Belgium are seeking posthumous justice for six-year-old schoolgirl Hind Rajab, who witnessed the deaths of five of her family before her own last moments were recorded in a phone call for help to a medical aid worker. The family had been fleeing south by car from Gaza City on 29 January 2024. They were slaughtered by potentially identifiable members of Israeli ground forces. Other activists in Brazil and Sweden, for example, are pursuing further cases in which recorded evidence shows Israeli soldiers breaking international or humanitarian law.
Although Israel gives its citizens in the IDF impunity from prosecution, the activists hope that where an accused soldier has dual nationality, a non-Israeli jurisdiction may permit a formal trial. If that happens, at least some of the truth about its conduct, which Israel’s prohibition on media access to Gaza during the genocide was meant to restrict, will at last be made public.
Even before his inauguration, President Trump had begun defunding UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East. He also explicitly proposed the ethnic cleansing of Gaza – a war crime – which he declared the US would then take over. Simultaneously, his administration is encouraging the intensified repression and further illegal settlement expansion already underway in the West Bank.
A people united still undefeated
The terror already unleashed on Gaza has failed in its declared objective of destroying the resistance. Neither has it broken the spirit of Gazans or Palestinians as a whole.
The sheer scale and intensity of what Palestine has endured so far and its uncertain future can have a numbing effect on those contemplating it (or averting their eyes from TV coverage of the carnage or its after effects). Yet millions who in their own lifetimes knew neither the horrors of South African apartheid nor the satisfaction of helping defeat it now know enough about Israeli apartheid to be ready, in growing numbers, to help dismantle it.
The only antidote to despair is to get involved. The rest of this article will therefore consider some of the plans recently announced by the main body organising solidarity with Palestinians.
Palestine Solidarity Campaign
After a year of unprecedented growth in activity and membership, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) held its packed annual general meeting in London on 1 February 2025. The AGM featured lively debate but impressive self-discipline and unity of purpose. One issue likely to resurface, as the UN and other international bodies, and civil society solidarity, all have a role in ending Israeli apartheid, is how these forums of action can best work together. The recognition of Palestine as a state (whatever the ultimate form of that state, to be determined by the Palestinians themselves) currently divides PSC members even though most countries officially recognise it (shown in green on this map).
Trade union links
Building on past successes in winning commitment to Palestine from union executives and conferences, above all at last year’s TUC, a programme of activities is planned to encourage further support throughout union structures and in workplaces as well. Workers experiencing falling living standards will become increasingly aware that potential restrictions on the right to protest about Israel can also be used against those taking industrial action.
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions
At the heart of PSC’s campaigning work for 2025 is a strategic expansion and intensification of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns against Israel and its accomplices – the flexible, coherent, realistic, manageable and monitored approach launched by the Palestinian-led BDS national committee back in 2005, and which has proved itself ever since with a growing list of successes, each building on those that came before.
It was especially appropriate, therefore, that guest speaker Omar Barghouti, perhaps the best-known founder of the BDS movement and its most eminent champion, reminded those present how BDS is geared to the overall Palestinian demands for freedom, equality and justice, and is an opportunity to popularise the cause of Palestinian self-determination.
The AGM heard of a new decision to add Coca-Cola to PSC’s existing portfolio of apartheid-complicit targets; the company’s welcome vulnerability on this issue is suggested by how its sales have plummeted in the Middle East since the start of the genocide. It would once have been unthinkable to take on a well-resourced behemoth like Coca-Cola, so this is a sign of how things are changing. (Since there was no Coca-Cola nor even Pepsi available at the AGM’s buffet lunch, delegates happily drank Palestinian owned Gaza Cola, or Cola Gaza, instead).
Barclays’ bad habit
Pressure will also be increased on savers and investors to withdraw their accounts from Barclays Bank, which helps finance the arms trade with Israel in violation of international law.
The bank was once a major corporate prop of white minority rule in South Africa and only later admitted how the anti-apartheid movement’s successful campaign for students to close their accounts had rattled its London board. The thinking behind the boycott was that, at least in those days, students going to college opened bank accounts and tended to stick to the same provider after graduating and perhaps for the rest of their lives. There was therefore sharp competition between rival banks to get students to sign up with them. No wonder Barclays were dismayed to find existing student customers, disgusted by the bank’s complicity with South African apartheid, closing their accounts and switching to a non-complicit competitor. Perhaps a new push on behalf of Palestine will help Barclays finally kick its bad habit of underwriting apartheid regimes.
“Every Little Helps” (Thank you, Tesco)
Another echo from the past is the successful boycott of South African apartheid produce. The PSC executive and delegates enthusiastically endorsed the idea of a simple leaflet aimed at supermarket shoppers that will list the most common Israeli products to avoid buying and suggest more ethical alternatives. This harks back to the still-widely remembered boycott of Outspan oranges, which encouraged a convenient and eventually habitual token of support for the victims of apartheid while doing little more than the weekly shop. This campaign was never likely nor intended to undermine apartheid all on its own, nor did shoppers expect it to; but who knows what its cumulative effect may have been?
Yet many people expressed themselves in this modest way, signalling (even if only to themselves) whose side they were on – a private gesture for which you don’t even need to be an activist. Those arguing for something similar now guess that Israel’s reputation among the general public has fallen so far that such an idea might well catch on again. We shall see. It’s not clear if Jaffa oranges will make it onto such a list, but if they do, shoppers might be reminded that boycotting Outspan helped bury one kind of apartheid and doing the same to Jaffa could help bury another.
Next steps
In mid-January 2025, some commentators, including London Mayor Sadiq Khan, naively declared that the imminent ceasefire in Gaza meant demonstrations for Palestine should end. If the Mayor thought a ceasefire, especially one as curtailed as Israel now seems to think it can get away with, was all that Palestinians could hope for, or would clear marchers from London’s streets, he was predictably mistaken. Moreover, the failure of attempts over the following few days to demonise or criminalise pro-Palestinian demonstrations, especially one in London on 18 January 2025 opposing the BBC’s bias against Palestinians, has strengthened the resolve of the solidarity movement to continue its actions unintimidated by genocide apologists.
At its AGM, PSC Director Ben Jamal gave a defiant answer to Sadiq Khan and his fellow critics: the solidarity movement will never be silent until every Palestinian, wherever they are, has the right to return to a free Palestine.
- This article was originally published by The Socialist Correspondent on 25 April 2025.
- You can follow the Palestine Solidarity Campaign on Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, Bluesky, YouTube and TikTok.
- The Labour Outlook Editorial Team may not always agree with all of the content we reproduce but are committed to giving left voices a platform to develop, debate, discuss and occasionally disagree.
