The United Church of Canada’s Unsettling Goods question-and-answer document

What this document is

This is a seven-page question-and-answer document published by the United Church of Canada about its Unsettling Goods campaign. The PDF was created on 15 April 2016 and revised three days later, and its text refers to events of March 2016, so it is a 2016 revision of an earlier version S251. It is the church explaining its own policy to its own members, which makes it a better record of what that policy is than any characterisation of it by a supporter or a critic.

What it establishes

The campaign is routinely listed as a Canadian success of the boycott movement. The church’s own document says otherwise, in terms, in answer to the very question. Asked whether an economic boycott of settlement products is the same as a boycott of Israel, it answers no and says the focus is on goods produced in the settlements S251. Elsewhere it says the church is making every effort to limit its economic action to products manufactured in the settlements, and that the resolution does not call for a boycott of the retailers who sell those products S251.

The document also records what the church’s 41st General Council of August 2012 affirmed alongside the economic measure: continuing support for a two-state solution; denunciation of attempts to undermine Israel’s legitimacy as a state; and the church’s long-standing affirmation of Israel as a Jewish state S251. It names the two companies then targeted and the four Canadian retailers written to in May 2013, which is why any company list published elsewhere needs a date attached: the targets changed over time S251S203. It reproduces in full the 2015 decision of the 42nd General Council, whose language is tied throughout to the occupation and whose verbs are to initiate, develop, recommend and encourage rather than to direct S251.

A body that adopts a settlement-products measure while affirming a two-state solution and Israel as a Jewish state has not endorsed the boycott campaign, whose founding call sets demands that a settlement-only measure cannot satisfy. Here the church says so itself.

Key passages

Answering whether its measure is a boycott of Israel, the church writes: “No. We are not recommending a boycott of Israel or of Israeli goods.” S251.

How it is used on this site

The document is cited on boycotting Israel and boycotting settlements and Does BDS help Palestinians?, and on the timeline.

Provenance and access

The document has been removed from the live church website, where its address now returns an error, and the copy read for this entry is the Internet Archive snapshot recorded above. The church’s campaign pages have also been removed, and the archived copy of the economic-action page is cited here for the target lists. The church’s Records of Proceedings for the 2012 and 2015 General Councils could not be obtained, so this site gives no motion number and quotes no adopted motion text.

Page history

2026-09-21: First draft.