“The national campaigning power of PSC, backing a small group of local activists, and against a backdrop of increasing public awareness of Israeli war crimes, all coalesced to deliver a groundbreaking result.”
By Margaret Robson and Paul Neill, Halifax Friends of Palestine
On 24 June 2025, the BDS movement scored a historic victory when the Co-op announced that they were stopping sourcing goods from Israel. This followed a campaign led by a small group of Co-op members of Halifax Friends of Palestine, calling on the Co-op Group to ‘show moral courage and leadership’ and take all Israeli products off the shelves in the light of the ongoing genocide in Gaza – just as they had for Russian goods in response to the invasion of Ukraine.
The genesis of the AGM motion was a lightbulb moment in December 2024, after letters written to Co-op Head Office calling for a boycott and local actions at Co-op stores (and other retailers) had failed to gain any traction. The Co-op had launched its ‘Owned by you, right by you’ campaign, which made much of the power of the membership to “shape our products and services, our ethics and how we serve communities.” This led us to a little-used option of submitting an Individual Members Motion on boycotting Israel at the Co-op’s 2025 AGM.
A valid motion had to be supported by 100 ‘wet ink’ signatures from members who had accrued the requisite number of dividend points through spend on their Co-op card in the previous year. The motion was crafted and we set about collecting the signatures using local contacts and reaching out to PSC branches across the UK. The process was painstaking and fraught with difficulty, as there was no way of easily checking eligibility and we couldn’t risk ineligible signatures. We finally submitted 150 names, most of them scrutinised individually by us or by close contacts and crossed our fingers that 100 of them would meet the criteria – which they did.
By now, UK Lawyers for Israel had got wind of the campaign, launching an unsuccessful last-ditch attempt to get the Co-op to withdraw the motion on the grounds it was antisemitic. Their efforts backfired spectacularly following their claim that the genocide was helping the Palestinians to overcome the problem of obesity. The subsequent media backlash made the national press and surely helped to boost the campaign.
Having cleared the final procedural hurdle in March 2025, we had already learned that the motion, if passed, would be considered ‘advisory’ by the Co-op to protect it from having to take action which might damage its commercial interests and reputation. Securing a decisive vote in favour at the AGM was therefore crucial to getting a clear mandate for the Co-op to abide by its members’ wishes.
At that point the work began to get the vote out. We knew that with over 5 million members and possibly 40,000 likely to vote, we had to work quickly in the few weeks remaining before the AGM, since the majority of votes would be cast online in advance of the meeting. We had no way of knowing how far the pro- Israel lobby would be activated to oppose the motion. The support of PSC nationally and some inspiring work from local branches, including Belfast BDS and Greater Manchester Friends of Palestine, in promoting the motion, was vital and helped to finally secure the 73% vote in favour.
We had already picked up signals that the Co-op’s senior team were sympathetic to the members’ voice on this issue. The CEO, Shirine Khoury-Haq, is herself of Palestinian/Turkish heritage, her father having been displaced to Lebanon in the Nakba. But, as she pointed out at the AGM, her primary responsibility was the success of the business.
Following the vote, the Co-op Board committed to review their trading policy, but given the potential for controversy in deciding to boycott Israeli products, there was a risk that the review could have been kicked into the long grass. So, we had to keep the pressure on the Co-op.
PSC nationally helped orchestrate a mass email campaign to the Board, urging them to speed up the promised review and implement the motion. A parallel Avaaz campaign gained 40,000 signatures.
As the first major UK supermarket to boycott Israel, it represented a major victory and a marker for the wider retail sector. The Co-op Alleanza chain in Italy (Italy’s largest consumer co-operative) quickly followed. Israeli exporters were later reported as saying that behind the scenes major European retailers like Germany’s Aldi and the UK’s Waitrose were quietly distancing themselves from Israeli produce, with Aldi subtly phasing out Israeli suppliers under the guise of seasonal changes.
The Co-op was certainly not the worst offender in terms of stocking Israeli produce, but as a membership organisation, with an ethical trading policy and commitment to member democracy, there was an obvious strategic opportunity to influence policy. The national campaigning power of PSC, backing a small group of local activists, and against a backdrop of increasing public awareness of Israeli war crimes, all coalesced to deliver a groundbreaking result.
- Margaret Robson and Paul Neill are Co-op members and Palestine Solidarity Campaign activists in West Yorkshire. They were part of a small group who led the campaign to get the Co-op to boycott Israeli products.
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