Major European retailer joins campaign to boycott Israeli settlement products
One of the largest food retailers in the UK has announced that it will boycott four Israeli produce companies which are operating in illegal settlement colonies in the West Bank in violation of international law. - The Co-operative Group is the 5th largest food retailer in the UK, and supplies thousands of stores with fruits and vegetables from around the world. On Sunday, the company announced that it will “no longer engage with any supplier of produce known to be sourcing from the Israeli settlements". According to the Co-operative Group, this is not a boycott of all Israeli products, only of those products coming from Israeli settlements. The £350,000 in contracts will be transferred to companies operating inside the 'Green Line' (an unofficial border between Israel and the West Bank established after the 1967 war). The new policy by the Co-operative Group will include Agrexco, Arava Export Growers, Adafresh and Mehadrin. It expands a previously stated policy of boycotting Israeli settlement products to include a boycott of any company that is known to source products from the settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.