Food Fight

Jon Haber
Divest This!
01 December '10

BDSers never seem to have much luck when they take their fights to the food aisles. Perhaps it is the necessity of food coupled with the pleasure it brings that highlights the fact that boycotters are threatening the former and completely lacking in the latter whenever they wave their fists at a package of Israeli couscous or, now, non-Israeli hummus.

The Battle of Coucous was waged last year when BDSers declared a Day of Rage directed at Trader Joe’s for daring to refuse to strip Israeli foods from their shelves, just because the boycotters demanded they do so. The Internet buzzed with threats that hundreds of protestors would descend on Trader Joe’s stores nationwide to picket and “deshelve” the hated Israeli couscous in protest of the store following its own conscience, rather than the will of the boycotters. But by the time the smoke cleared, the only activity the threatened boycott managed to gin up was thousands of Israeli supporters buying out Trader Joe’s Israeli stock across the country.

Today, the battle has turned to hummus, not hummus produced in Israel but Sabra hummus produced in the US. While not my personal favorite brand (although I did buy a bunch of it on Buy Israeli Goods Day yesterday), Sabra is owned by the Strauss Group, an Israeli food conglomerate that does a fair amount of charitable work within Israel in areas such as education, sports and health. In addition, they make donations of money, sports equipment and recreation facilities to two units of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

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