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ISRAEL

Swedish consumer group urges Israel boycott

A consumer organization in western Sweden with some 350,000 members has called on the country's Coop supermarkets to stop selling all goods from Israel.

Three resolutions urging a ban on Israeli products were approved by a majority of the 425 members in attendance at Saturday’s annual meeting in Gothenburg of the consumer cooperative society for western Sweden, Konsumentföreningen Väst (KF Väst). The resolutions cited Israel’s role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as grounds for a boycott.

“The board will now push the issue of a boycott to the other Swedish consumer cooperatives,” said chairperson Carina Malmer in a statement.

KF Väst is one of the largest of the 47 consumer cooperative societies that make up the Swedish Cooperative Union, which has more than 3 million members.

The Swedish Cooperative Union owns the Coop chain of supermarkets. According to the union’s own figures, the retail consumer cooperative societies and Coop together account for 21.4 percent of the grocery retail sector in Sweden.

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ISRAEL

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street

A former Israeli soldier was attacked in the German capital Berlin, police said Saturday, with one or several unknown assailants spraying him with an irritant and throwing him to the ground.

Former Israeli soldier attacked on Berlin street
Israeli soldiers on operation near the Gaza Strip. Photo: dpa | Ilia Yefimovich

The 29-year-old was wearing a top with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) logo when the attackers started harassing him on Friday about his religion, the police added, calling it “an anti-Semitic attack”.

Officers are seeking the assailants, who fled immediately after the attack, on suspicion of a politically-motivated crime.

Saturday is the second anniversary of an attack by a far-right gunman on a synagogue in the eastern German city of Halle, who killed two in a rampage when he failed to break into the house of worship.

It was one of a string of incidents that led authorities to declare the far right and neo-Nazis Germany’s top security threat.

Also this week, a musician claimed he was turned away from a hotel in eastern city Leipzig for wearing a Star-of-David pendant.

While the allegations prompted a fierce response from a Jewish community unsettled by increasing anti-Semitic crimes, several investigations have been mounted into contradictory accounts of the incident.

In 2019, police recorded 2,032 anti-Semitic crimes, an increase of 13 percent year-on-year.

“The threat is complex and comes from different directions” from jihadists to the far right, the federal government’s commissioner for the fight against anti-Semitism Felix Klein said recently.

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