Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

British Jews Seek To Block Leicester Ban on Settlement Products

A British Jewish group asked the country’s high court to review a municipality’s decision last year to support a boycott of products from the West Bank.

Jonathan Neumann, director of Jewish Human Rights Watch — a group devoted to monitoring efforts to boycott Israel — earlier this month filed with the High Court of Justice of England and Wales a request for judicial review of a nonbinding motion passed by the City Council of Leicester supporting a boycott of products from the West Bank.

The motion, passed in November and submitted by council member Mohammed Dawood, calls for boycotting such products “in so far as it is legal,” citing Israel’s “continuing to ignore and breach international law” and “continuing its occupation of Palestinian territories.”

But Neumann said the motion was anti-Semitic, because it was a boycott of goods produced by Jews.

“Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen by the British, there are calls in Europe and the United Kingdom to boycott Jews once again,” he said in video taken outside the Royal Court of Justice in London.

The High Court is scheduled to reply next month to the request for review.

Dawood this week told the BBC: “We are very mindful that this was not an attack on a particular faith but is about a particular policy.”

In the past, judicial review has blocked attempts to promote boycotts of Israel in Britain and elsewhere in Europe.

In 2007, the administration of the University and College Union announced it would not implement a motion to boycott Israel passed by a majority of its members because doing so would be “illegal” and “run a serious risk of infringing discrimination legislation.”

In France, members of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement against Israel have been convicted of inciting racial hate based on a 2003 amendment, introduced by a Jewish lawmaker, which forbids discrimination against people or groups of any particular national affiliation.

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

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.