Melissa Morrone and Tara Tabassi with endnote by Jan Clausen and Morgan Võ, 2013
Pro-Palestinian members of The Park Slope Food Coop are currently waging a vigorous campaign to institute a boycott of Israeli products, a new iteration of the earlier efforts detailed in the following essay. An end note from current organizers describes this and other developments since the initial surge of BDS activism in 2012.
It’s early 2013. We’re in a packed Brooklyn middle school auditorium on a Tuesday night, in the middle of a Park Slope Food Coop membership meeting. The main topic under discussion is Palestine and Israel, and whether the Coop should implement policies that would stifle conversation and proposals related to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Some members express general frustration over this sort of politicized subject at the Coop. One older member takes the mic. The Coop is a political place, and it always has been, he proclaims to the crowd. And if you’re new here, he adds, “Catch up!”
This is a story about our continuing campaign to have our cooperative grocery store join the global BDS movement against Israeli Apartheid. But it is also a story about Brooklyn, about the politics of cooperation, and about the complexities of building community across borders by recognizing the potential of people power within globalized capitalist economies.
The boycott tactic as a non-violent tool for social change has a long history, encompassing the Indian “Swadeshi” boycott of British goods in the early 1900s; the 1950s Montgomery bus boycott; the California grape boycott of the 1960s; and the infamous boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against Apartheid-era South Africa that picked up steam through the late 20th century. Boycotts can be used to pressure businesses and governments alike.
Today, boycotting is also a consumer-activist way of engaging with Israel. In 2005, over 170 organizations and associations representing Palestinian civil society put out a call asking the international community to join a global effort for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against the state of Israel until three conditions are met: the end of the occupation of all Arab lands, equal rights for Palestinian citizens of Israel, and the right of return for all Palestinian refugees (Palestinian National BDS Committee, 2005).
Joining the BDS movement is a conversation of sorts to Israel that says, “We ask you, as a community, to abide by international law and human rights, and to abide by your own professed democratic principles.” It is impossible to send this message by individually, passively refusing to buy Israeli goods. As former Olympia Food Co-op and current Park Slope Food Coop member Phan Nguyen explains:
“When individual consumers simply refuse to purchase a product out of ethical concerns, it doesn’t necessarily transmit a message to the producer. Unfortunately, the idea of changing the world through one’s own shopping habits is popular these days in Western consumer society. Collectively boycotting Israeli-produced hummus, on the other hand, is ridiculed as ‘symbolic,’ as if the goal were to punish hummus. Wrong. It is through our deliberate interactions with these Israeli ‘symbols’ that we have found the leverage to engage with the Israeli government” (personal communication, February 22, 2013).
Boycotting and alternative food systems are generally not about a break with capitalism. Boycotts rely on capitalism, or at least a preservation of existing economic structures, to execute this tactic. In the same vein, food coops, operating within the market system, at their core are limited in the radical change they can effect in their locales.
But BDS is a way of working within capitalism to create pressure. Ordinary people can confront Israel’s militarized colonial projects with something as “simple” as a refusal to buy Sabra hummus, Born Free baby bottles, or SodaStream seltzer makers. Of course, it isn’t this simple. Boycotting in general and BDS in particular is not about individual consumer choices; it’s about collective action under the auspices of a global movement, and ideally that action is seen as threatening by those in power. In our efforts to start a boycott campaign against Israel at the Coop, we challenged the status quo that says that Israel should be supported by people in the U.S., and that the Coop is just a great place to get healthy food at good prices.
Our approach to BDS activism at the Coop is that we are U.S. residents recognizing our interdependence with people around the planet. We are New Yorkers who believe in the power of international solidarity. We are Coop members who care not only about Palestine but also about oppressions that affect us in our neighborhoods and in the Coop itself. We are taxpayers whose money is being funneled to objectionable projects, including military aid to Israel. We see our participation in BDS as being linked with resistance to economic injustice, state violence, and corporate greed of all stripes.
Our location is an important factor in how our work proceeded. The borough of Brooklyn has been “hot” for years now, with gentrification permeating many neighborhoods. A 2001 article about the Coop noted, “The neighborhoods [of Park Slope and its surroundings] have changed rapidly in the last twenty-five years from quiet, mostly Catholic working-class enclaves to eclectic, largely gay havens for artists and students, and more recently, to a fashionable outpost of Manhattan where many prosperous young professionals have chosen to rear their children” (Jochnowitz, 2001, p. 56). And it’s gotten only more “fashionable”, “prosperous,” and whiter, since then. Navigating issues of displacement, class, race, religion, identity, and NYC-authenticity is part of life in Brooklyn as well as being a Coop member.
The Coop, in the heart of gentrified Park Slope, was founded in 1973 by a politicized group of people interested in creating alternative structures in order to collectively access healthy local food in an affordable way. This was an era when many people starting food cooperatives “believed they were the seers of American capitalism’s dying days […] and the founders of a liberating and righteous cultural and economic substitute” (McGrath, 2004, p. 3). Since its modest beginnings, our cooperative now has over 16,000 members, each of whom is a member-owner—buying into the Coop as an investor, as well as working a monthly shift in exchange for a 20-40% discount.
The Coop has long occupied a relatively significant place in the Brooklyn and even NYC psyche. There are competing narratives: Is it about judgmental bearded hippies in overalls? Or is it yuppies who make their nannies do their work slots? Or New Age-y types with their many varieties of non-dairy milks and ear candles? And now we have the infamous dichotomy of Zionist elder white folks versus BDS multi-culti activists.
Long-time members point out that the Coop is now far more diverse, racially and otherwise, than it was in the past. While today’s Coop demographics dip into multiple classes, races, religions, genders, and sexual identities much more than at its founding, those who take up decision-making space are not necessarily representative of the membership as a whole. This stark reality is apparent when gazing at the wall of pictures of the paid staff, the Coordinators: the faces of white elders are in the top tiers of the management, with the lower ranks more proportionately filled with people of color. For some, the workings of systemic oppression are experienced daily within the Coop doors. For the others, it’s simply an organic shopping haven.
An exponential increase in the number of people who have joined the Coop, coupled with a general trend towards adoption of “eco” and “green” lifestyles stripped of most analysis of systemic injustice, means that it can be an uphill battle even to convince members that a political question is relevant to Coop operations. We join and stay at the Coop for different reasons. We come from different places and sometimes competing spaces, though there is at least a shared commitment to food and health, to saving money and engaging in alternative models within capitalism (even if the political awareness is not always there), and to a desire for what we eat to be sourced sustainably and with conscience. Because of these common grounds, our Coop is a crucial environment in which to plant the seeds of the expanding BDS movement against Israel’s abuses.
Theoretically, the Coop emphasizes standing together as a cohesive community in support of environmental respect, human rights, food justice, and positive global interdependence. Particularly relevant to those interested in BDS and implementing the corresponding policy change is a passage in the Coop’s very own Mission Statement: “We seek to avoid products that depend on the exploitation of others. […] We are committed to diversity and equality. We oppose discrimination in any form. We strive to make the Coop welcoming and accessible to all and to respect the opinions, needs and concerns of every member. We seek to maximize participation at every level, from policy making to running the store” (Park Slope Food Coop, n.d.).
In addition to the specificity of a campaign in support of Palestinians’ rights, having an explicitly political campaign appealed to us because it helps combat the idea that the Coop is merely a place to get good inexpensive produce and cheese. As the Coop membership has grown rapidly over the last decade, so has a certain depoliticization. But despite claims otherwise, the Coop is an explicitly political space, from the large “No Fracking” sign taped on the window facing busy Union Street, to the long and commendable history of using its buying power to strengthen national and international boycotts. From its founding, the Coop observed the South African boycott to end Apartheid, more than a decade before the tactic gained popularity in the U.S. In the 1980s and ‘90s, we boycotted Scott, Libby (Nestle), and Campbell (Pepperidge Farms) products, joined boycotts in support of United Farm Workers, and we boycotted all Chilean products during its dictatorship.
Since the 2000s, the membership regularly votes overwhelmingly to continue boycotting Coca Cola and its subsidiaries, such as Odwalla. We voted to ban bottled water and plastic bags, and in 2010 were the first grocery store in Park Slope to boycott Brooklyn-based Flaum Appetizing for union-busting and workers’ rights violations. Back issues of the twice-monthly newspaper, the Coop Linewaiters’ Gazette, include numerous articles about labor struggles and product boycotts (though whether the Coop as a whole should be involved in social justice was heavily questioned in the early ‘80s as it pertained to housing and gentrification). The Coop has always been a political body, carefully choosing what should and should not enter our cooperative doors.
Strategically speaking, BDS campaigns within food cooperatives make sense. Food coops are political institutions, founded and nourished by larger movements for economic, environmental, and social justice — despite their questionable relationship with capitalism, as noted above. While the Coop has a significant political history of engaging in consumer boycotts, we are not alone in attempting a BDS campaign within a food cooperative. Proposals to join BDS have occurred in cooperatives in Washington, California and Michigan, though most were eventually voted down by boards or, in one case, refused due to “policy-violations.”
The most notable, however, is the Olympia Food Co-op, which made the historic decision to de-shelve Israeli products in 2010, marking itself as the first U.S. grocery store to sign onto BDS. This action came after a long community effort of educational workshops, street art and media highlighting the violent realities of Israeli Apartheid, and dialogue among community members. While this BDS victory was celebrated in Olympia as well as in Palestine, Brooklyn, and elsewhere, the backlash felt by the board and staff in Olympia was hefty, starting with aggressive emails and phone calls and later developing into a full lawsuit against the board of directors. Olympia’s decision also spurred mainstream Jewish organizations in the U.S. to pledge $6 million to fight national BDS efforts. Olympia Food Co-op’s campaign and the reaction to it, particularly from high-level Israeli government officials, only shines light on the significance and effectiveness of joining a movement that in food coops manifests as de-shelving only a few Israeli items.
The Park Slope Food Coop BDS campaign started in January 2009, during the horror of Operation Cast Lead, when a member named Hima mentioned BDS during a General Meeting (GM). In October 2010, this incarnation of activists coalesced to work together on building a BDS campaign. During the most mobilized periods, we were 20 or so active organizers with around 200 friends and allies with whom we were in touch.
From the start, we considered a membership-wide referendum as the most democratic and effective method to decide on BDS. Throughout Coop history, in-person voting during the GM has been the fundamental way to make decisions. There is, however, precedent for membership-wide referenda on particularly charged proposals, such as whether the Coop should carry meat. We felt that conducting a vote on BDS at the GM would provide adequate time for each member to research, deliberate and cast a private vote, thus obtaining the most representative results. Even the best-attended GM comes out to less than 5% of the total membership. Besides, the reality is that the demographic who generally attends GMs does not reflect the wider membership, as it is either those who feel politically invested in a particular issue, those going just to get work credit, or the same small group of people committed to Coop operations, who are able to attend hours of meeting on a weeknight.
Whether or not to have a referendum would itself have to be first voted on at a GM. In February 2011, we submitted a proposal that read, “We call for a referendum to participate in the global nonviolent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel’s violations of international law and human rights.” By the following month, an organized opposition to our effort had formed online and via letters — often vitriolic, including tarring BDS supporters as anti-Semites — in the Linewaiters’ Gazette signed by members calling themselves “More Hummus Please” (fittingly, hummus is a prominent example of Israeli cultural appropriation of traditionally Palestinian foods). Joe Holtz, a founding Coop member and one of the General Coordinators, spoke out multiple times against a referendum on BDS. His final plea was for people to “Vote Coop,” meaning that anyone who was concerned about the Coop’s future should vote no on the referendum proposal. (This formulation is an echo of how Olympia organizers were attacked as outside agitators who didn’t care about their Coop.) It was a reminder that Palestine solidarity activists must continually assert ourselves as part of our communities.
At our Coop, we engaged in a number of tactics and activities. We wrote many letters to the Linewaiters’ Gazette, both to describe abuses faced by Palestinians and the value of joining the BDS movement, and to respond to specific anti-BDS arguments made by Coop members and staff. We held several events in the Coop’s community meeting room (accessible to non-members as well), including film screenings and discussions led by activists and writers on topics such as Gaza in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, food justice in Israel-Palestine, discrimination in Hebron, and the plight of the Bedouins in the Negev. We staged weekly, sometimes daily, flyering sessions in front of the Coop to chat with fellow members and pass out information about BDS and the referendum proposal, where we were met with interest, expressions of solidarity, indifference, hostility, and physical violence.
We also used social media to spread the news about the vote and the wider BDS movement. On Twitter, we had a tweet series in the voices of members, to show that BDS supporters were just as much a part of the Coop as anyone: “I’m the one shopping with my baby,” or “I’m the one buying two bunches of kale,” along with encouragement to vote yes to a BDS referendum at the upcoming GM. On Facebook, we posted photos of members holding signs expressing their desire to see peace and justice in Palestine, and vote at the GM.
The big vote took place in the March 2012 GM at Brooklyn Technical High School to accommodate around 2000 people. The final tally was 1005 against and 653 in favor of a BDS referendum (not necessarily in favor of BDS per se).
Since the stress and excitement of the vote, we have continued to organize, albeit on a much smaller scale. The Coop’s newspaper is still a site of discussion and argument about Israel, Palestine and BDS. In June 2012, we tussled with Coop staff when they accepted and then canceled a proposal for a “Zionist pinkwashing at home and abroad” event, on the grounds that it would criticize another community organization (NYC’s LGBT Center), thus violating the cooperative principles on which the Coop intends to operate. Our website is a source of information about Israeli products that the Coop carries. In a broader context, we are regarded as an active part of the constellation of New York City Palestine solidarity groups — for example, invited to endorse statements and events.
How did our actions fit into Brooklyn and the rest of the city? Even when Hima first brought up the subject of BDS, without any particular proposal, back in 2009, an explosion of attention followed. The combination of the Park Slope Food Coop and an anti-Israel initiative was irresistible to local and international media. Some illustrative headlines: “Soy Vey! Could a Hummus Fight Kill the Co-op?” (New York Observer, 8/3/11), “Members Of This Trendy Brooklyn Food Co-op Are Considering A Ban On Israeli Products” (Business Insider, 2/23/12), and “Goy-cott in Park Slope” (New York Post, 8/25/11). The bizarre apex of the media attention was when we were invited to be part of a “Daily Show” segment with Samantha Bee.
As part of our campaign, we amassed statements of support written and/or signed by two dozen international people and organizations, including Alice Walker, Mustafa Barghouthi, Boycott from Within, Jewish Voice for Peace, Brooklyn For Peace, CodePink, and the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. But on the other side, the strongly Zionist character of mainstream New York City made its presence clear. Many politicians (including otherwise progressive City Council members, such as Brad Lander and Leticia James) made statements against our campaign and called it anti-Semitic, among other smears.
Most notable in this group was Mayor Michael Bloomberg himself, who was quoted in a New York Times article accusing BDS advocates of wanting “Israel to be torn apart and everybody to be massacred” (Grynbaum, 2012). (Interestingly, Bloomberg used very different rhetoric during the hullaballoo about a February 2013 talk on BDS at Brooklyn College by U.S. scholar Judith Butler and Palestinian academic and activist Omar Barghouti; this time, he reiterated his abhorrence to BDS but, in the name of academic freedom, criticized those who would silence Butler and Barghouti. Evidently he had not seen a food coop as being in the same principled league, although the Coop was important enough for him to make that vicious public statement.) Indeed, it seems that our Coop campaign was the catalyst for developing a high-level anti-BDS infrastructure in NYC, as Nguyen has detailed (2013). New York City’s opposition to BDS is so strong that “even seasoned activists can become quickly overwhelmed by the attacks and lies propagated by the opposition,” says Nguyen (personal communication, February 22, 2013). In general, he recommends that activists new to BDS consult with folks who have achieved local success.
In some circles, talk of the well-known BDS campaign at the Coop is that we “failed” because we lost the 2012 vote for a referendum. While we lost the opportunity to hear what the entire membership thought about BDS, this process was not a failure. BDS is a long-term, international movement whose local victories will seem small until it is a normalized approach to justice across our globe. As solidarity activists, we saw victory when BDS became a topic of conversation in the Coop, when we created momentum for community members to dialogue, and when more Brooklynites became aware of the experiences of living within occupied Palestine. We saw victory in the mass media coverage of our campaign, even when it was ugly, because entering New Yorkers’ consciousness at that level meant that we were succeeding in pushing the conversation about Israel’s oppression of Palestinians into the mainstream discourse.
We see victory as we use the tactic of BDS as a crowbar to keep our cooperative grocery store open as a political space where we talk about human rights, U.S. complicity in Israeli Apartheid, and international solidarity. We retain our vision of making radical change happen from a place where people buy granola and kale. We Park Slope Food Coop members for BDS remain committed to promoting BDS as a nonviolent people-power tactic. Whether it’s genetically-modified corn, bottled water, or apartheid — whether South African or Israeli — our Coop is a place where we are able to assert that enough is enough.
Endnote
Melissa Morrone’s and Tara Tabassi’s excellent essay was written more than a decade ago. In the intervening years, PSFC Members for BDS (PSFC-BDS) continued to agitate, albeit at a far lower level of intensity. Eventually, the group dwindled to about half a dozen. Following the events of October 7, 2023, a large, energetic new contingent came together in what is now called PSFC Members for Palestine. We two are active with this initiative, Jan as a holdover from the old group. We will briefly sketch the post-2012 history before describing the current state of a boldly reinvigorated campaign.
In 2015, PSFC-BDS put forward a proposal for a targeted boycott of an especially problematic item, SodaStream sparkling water dispensers. After several Zionist members disrupted a presentation of the proposal at a monthly General Meeting (GM) later that year, the Coop’s General Coordinators (GCs) claimed they could not find a large enough meeting space to hold the anticipated vote on the measure. Requests to vote using mail-in paper ballots or electronic methods were stymied using the bureaucratic and procedural resources at the disposal of the Coop’s paid staff.
Every effort was made to “close the loopholes” of democratic opportunity that this essay so valuably describes as a positive feature of the Coop’s contradictory social space. In 2016, a Zionist Coop member successfully campaigned to override the traditional simple majority threshold for passing new measures, requiring a 75% supermajority to approve any boycott. The GCs arbitrarily banned holding programs related to Palestine, Israel, or BDS in the Coop’s meeting space; the Coop newspaper increasingly censored BDS-related material. The initial stages of the covid pandemic disrupted business as usual, further constraining opportunities to interact freely with the membership.
Yet PSFC-BDS continued to agitate, distributing fliers and talking to members outside the Coop, particularly at times when the urgency of freedom for Palestine vaulted into the headlines, as during the Great March of Return in 2018. Beyond the PSFC-BDS group, there were other important campaigns for democracy and justice within the Coop, including an effort at unionization by non-supervisory paid staff that was defeated using what one activist called “classic union-busting tactics.” During the period of intense protests following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, members once again forcefully raised demands that the Coop do more to combat racism, a concern that has simmered for decades. Clearly, the fight for democratic participation at the Coop was not dead when the events of October 7, 2023 helped spur renewed calls for a boycott of Israeli products.
On the one hand, PSFC Members for Palestine now faces many of the same tactics (as well as the same individuals) who forcefully opposed BDS at the Coop in 2012, and who now have additional anti-democratic tools, such as the supermajority rule, at their disposal. On the other, the new group draws on an amazing amount of talent and dedication, imaginative and diverse approaches, a groundswell of public indignation at Israel’s atrocities, and the sense of a generational shift in the recognition of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination.
Amidst the ever-worsening genocide of Palestinians, where do we find optimism? Reading Morrone and Tabassi’s descriptions of conversations had over 10 years ago, their recollections echo some of our own experiences with fellow members today. When we canvass the line outside the Coop, we regularly hear members assert that the Coop is not a political space. Yet, in the urgency of this moment, we find such members are more open to a genuine conversation about why the Park Slope Food Coop is a political space, why it is not only appropriate but in fact necessary to hold accountable companies that are complicit in the Israeli systems of oppression, why it is time to draw a line and refuse our cooperation. And conversely, our canvassers are regularly met with a sigh of relief, “Ah, I’ve been looking for you all! How can I contribute?”
There is no doubt that passing a boycott of Israeli products at the Park Slope Food Coop remains a challenging fight. Yet there are clear signs that the tides are turning, that our fellow members are rightly questioning our roles in the horror unfolding before us, and that, as a community engaged in cooperation, an appreciation for our moral responsibility and imperative to act is rising.
References
Grynbaum, M. (2012, March 26). Boycott plan at food co-op is opposed by city officials. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/27/nyregion/boycott-plan-at-park-slope-food-co-op-draws-politicians-opposition.html
Jochnowitz, E. (2001). Edible activism: food, commerce, and the moral order at the Park Slope Food Coop. Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, 1(4), 55-63.
McGrath, M. (2004). “That’s capitalism, not a co-op”: countercultural idealism and business realism in 1970s U.S. food co-ops. Business and Economic History On-Line, 2. Retrieved from http://www.thebhc.org/publications/BEHonline/2004/McGrath.pdf
Nguyen, P. (2013, February 12). How the JCRC inspired New York officials to fight BDS. Retrieved from http://mondoweiss.net/2013/02/inspired-officials-fight.html
Palestinian National BDS Committee (2005, July 9). Palestinian civil society call for BDS. Retrieved from http://www.bdsmovement.net/call
Park Slope Food Coop (n.d.). Mission statement. Retrieved from http://foodcoop.com/go.php?id=38