Israel-Palestine: our new company rating

In perhaps our most unanimous survey ever, 96% of Ethical Consumer newsletter subscribers who responded to our survey said they would find a rating assessing a company’s links to the Israeli government useful. 

We launched the survey and subsequent rating category after not just two years but decades of readers getting in touch to ask: ‘Is this brand linked to the Israeli government?’

We’ve designed a rating which answers that question. 

We’re planning to include this rating in every product guide from our next issue (December 2025). We’ve trialled it on the companies in the new bookshops guide, and a summary of the results are below. Do share your feedback on any of this by contacting us.

Why create the Israel-Palestine rating?

While this is the first time we’ve created a dedicated column in our score table for Israel-Palestine, in some ways it’s nothing new. 

Ethical Consumer had a dedicated column focused on company links to Apartheid South Africa when the magazine was founded in 1989. And we’ve spotlighted campaigns against companies complicit in Palestinian human rights abuses since then, too. But we think it’s worth adding this column formally to our score table, for several reasons.

1. Demand. Our readers want this rating.

And, providing it helps us fulfil our core mission: making it easy for people to spend according to their ethics, by putting as much relevant information as possible in one place in an easy-to-understand format.

2. Trust. There are brilliant apps and websites highlighting brand complicity in this issue, but there is also a lot of misinformation and poorly referenced advice. We know readers trust our research.

3. Niche brands. Most of the niche ethical brands in our scoretables don’t feature on other apps and websites on this topic, so there’s no simple way of knowing what their stance is. Adding this into the scoretable means, for the first time, their approach is assessed too.

4. Ranking. There’s a big difference between a brand that sells weapons, and a brand that tells staff members not to wear a watermelon pin. This more nuanced and detailed rating helps to draw out these differences between companies.

5. Normalising. This rating enables us to normalise and promote companies that have strong policies in solidarity with Palestinian human rights. By designing a rating so that companies can only receive high scores when they publish an explicit policy on Israel-Palestine, we hope to make it uncontroversial for companies to distance themselves from the current Israeli government, building international pressure to make Israel abide by international human rights resolutions.

Why Israel is a special case

When we were surveying readers about our plans to create this ranking, we were sometimes asked why we want to focus on Israel and not on other parts of the world where horrific abuses are taking place – such as Sudan and Myanmar.

Although Ethical Consumer has a long history of publishing around a more general notion of oppressive regimes, we think that in September 2025 Israel has become a special case.

In the post-war period following 1945, international institutions were developed to create a rule-based system built around the notion of human rights. Although there have been many hundreds of transgressions since then, by and large the most high profile of these have been called out by other governments and collective responses have emerged.

What has happened in the aftermath of the October 2023 Hamas attacks is that Israel has gone on to transgress so many rules so quickly, in such an obvious manner, that even the flawed pretence of international order that we once had is in danger of being lost.

This is especially the case because most Western governments, unlike in their response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine for example, have failed to respond anywhere near adequately to what has become the most blatant and documented moral issue of our time.

Oxfam’s new Red Line for Gaza campaign recently encapsulated some of the boundaries which Israel has overstepped:

• starving people
• killing civilians
• killing children
• targeting aid workers
• killing the hungry

To this we might add some more recent lines:

• targeting journalists
• bombing six neighbouring countries
• genocide

Use of the word genocide, once carefully avoided here, has now become widely accepted as the correct term to be used in this case. On September 1st 2025, the International Association of Genocide Scholars stated that Israel’s conduct met the legal definition as laid out in the UN Convention on Genocide.

It is therefore this combination of number and seriousness of boundaries crossed, with the inadequacy of response from most governments in spite of the high profile, vast documentation, and demands from civil societies around the world, that makes Israel a special case. If governments and international rights bodies allow Israel to carry out these abuses with immunity in Gaza, what hope is there for other communities around the world whose oppression is far less covered or known about?

Ethical Consumer has formally supported the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement since 2014, and we see contributing this research as part of what we can do to help respond to the Palestinian call for solidarity.

Initiatives such as Business Leaders for Peace - a list of over 1,000 UK business leaders, founders and professionals calling for government intervention in Gaza - show that there are many companies wanting to use what influence they have to call for justice in Palestine. We’re exploring ways to collaborate with this initiative.

What does the Israel-Palestine rating explore? 

Our ethical rating contains seven sections coving different aspects of engagement with Israel. Brands lose or gain points based on elements within each section.

The seven sections are outlined below.
 

Bookshops ranked on Israel-Palestine 

Access to books and education is one of many rights denied to Palestinian people. 

Gaza’s main bookshops were bombed by Israel in 2021. The Samir Mansour Bookshop and Library was rebuilt in 2022 with help from a fundraising campaign, but damaged again in an airstrike in October 2023.

In 2025, Palestinian bookshops in Jerusalem were ransacked by Israeli police, who confiscated boxes worth of books that featured, for example, the Palestinian flag, or were authored by Banksy or Noam Chomsky.

While we value our bookshelves and the authors whose labour stocks them, buying a book still means handing profits to a company – and is it a company you want to financially support?

Bookshops with links to Israel

Over a third (38%) of the bookshop brands in our guide belonged to company groups that actively supported the Israeli government, or other institutions or companies whose operations facilitate Palestinian human rights abuses. 

These brands with active support of the Israeli government or other direct connections are: 

• brands owned by investment firm Elliott (Blackwell’s, Foyles, Hatchard’s, Waterstones, and Wordery)
• Apple
• Amazon and its brands AbeBooks and Audible
• Google 

With Amazon’s share of UK book sales at more than 50%, we can also say that most books sold in the UK have links to the Israeli government.

Four brands (15% of the brands in the guide) – AbeBooks, Amazon, Audible, and Google – have been identified by Palestinian campaigners as the most important boycott targets.

Bookshops that support Palestine

Half of brands in our guide appeared to have no relationships with the Israeli government, or companies or institutions inside Israel.

Just two (8%) of the bookshop brands in our guide had published statements confirming that they would not work or trade with the Israeli government or other complicit institutions or companies on the basis of Palestinian human rights’ abuses. These were Ebooks.com and Oxfam.

Some extracts from our ranking research appear in the table below. Scores are from worst to best.

*A Guardian News & Media spokesperson said:

On your petitions assertions: "In 2023 the Guardian added wording to our editorial code to clarify our position on outside interests that could appear to compromise the editorial integrity of individual journalists or Guardian News & Media."

On your coverage assertions: "The Guardian reports extensively on the crisis in the Middle East, with coverage led by our experienced journalists working on the ground across the region. Their deep expertise has enabled us to provide readers with coverage of exceptional rigour and depth, always placing the human cost at the centre of our reporting."