A Tale of Two Co-ops

Jon Haber
Divest This!
26 August '10
Posted before Shabbat

Below is a piece I've developed for another project (more details as they become available). If anyone is involved with or aware of boycott projects going on at co-ops other than the ones mentioned in this story, please pass this onto them as a resource.

Unlike large commercial retailers, locally owned food cooperatives are highly responsive to local constituencies, notably the membership who are the co-op’s official owners. But the very things that make a membership-owned co-op an important part of a community (an open ear to member concerns, a commitment to political causes of local interest) also make them vulnerable to BDS advocates claiming that co-op principles require them to take part in boycotts of Israeli goods.

Two recent examples illustrate how things can go very right and very wrong when boycott gets on the agenda of a local co-op community.

Early in 2010, members of the Davis Food Co-op in Davis, California presented a petition asking that a boycott of Israeli foods carried by the store be put to a member vote. While the petitioners claimed to have the required number of signatures (5%) needed to institute such a vote, the organization’s by-laws also required that the co-op’s board of directors first approve a vote by determining if the proposed question is legal and serves a “proper purpose.”

Fortunately, community members against the boycott were made aware of what was being proposed and worked tirelessly to ensure that the board was hearing from a variety of voices, not just those advocating for BDS. In addition to taking input from all parties, the board sought outside legal advice as well as researching what other co-ops had done when faced with similar situations.

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Besieging is Believing

Jon Haber
Guest Post
CiF Watch
13 August '10

Omar Barghouti’s celebration of the boycott movement (Comment is Free, August 12) finally crossing the Atlantic – with the boycott of Israeli goods at a food co-op in Olympia Washington – seems to have missed the fact that BDS jumped to this side of the pond nearly ten years ago with boycott and divestment campaigns at US colleges and universities, Mainline Protestant churches, cities and unions dotting the landscape starting in 2002. Perhaps the fact that all of these BDS measures failed miserably is why he wants to restart his campaign’s US premiere nearly a decade later.

And speaking of restarts, what’s with the 2005 start date for the BDS “movement?” After all, BDS began in 2001 at the now-notorious Durban I UN “anti-racism” conference where NGO’s met and chose to pursue their “Apartheid Strategy” of de-legitimization, with BDS as the primary tactic. Perhaps a 2005 start date lets Mr. Barghouti flush the first half decade of BDS failure down the memory hole, although he may simply be conflating the start of any significant political project with the beginning of his involvement with it.

I know it’s fashionable to cite the July 9, 2005 “Palestinian Civil Society Calls for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Against Israel” (Mr. Barghouti’s “170 Palestinian political parties, unions, mass movements and NGOs” led by his own BNC organization) as the origin of a BDS campaign that actually began years earlier.

Given its importance to the BDS mythos, I decided to check out just who made up this list of 170. And, lo and behold, who tops the list but the Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine, a coalition that includes Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and some of the more violent sub-sets of Fatah. Call me a cynic, but I suspect that it must be much easier for this Islamic Forces Council to get the Palestinian Dentist’s Association to agree to its agenda than vice versa.

After a decade of tireless effort by BDS activists around the globe, one would think their list of success stories would consist of more than a few symbolic divestment gestures by unknown Scandinavian retirement funds or the occasional aging celebrity choosing to cancel an Israeli appearance rather than have Mr. Barghouti’s friends protest their concerts for years to come.

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Playing Catchup

Jon Haber
Divest This!
27 July '10

Having inflicted a month of Presbyterian politics on my reader recently, I’m committed to not overdoing the whole Olympia Co-op thing (even though I suspect this will be one of those seemingly trivial cases that turn into a nationwide lesson on the perils of allowing the BDS virus into an organization).

So what have we missed while the Olympians have been turning from a friendly community into armed camps? Well:

1. Thanks to the tireless effort of Code Pink and friends, Ahava sales have gone through the roof. (Nice to know the whole Buycott thing is making its way so strongly from Canada to the rest of the world.)

2. Can you believe it! Another BDS hoax. In this case, the Ma’an news agency announced that Israel’s Tara dairy company had moved its factories off the Golan Heights in order to avoid having their products boycotted in the West Bank. Quite a coup, except for the fact that Tara has no factories on the Golan Heights and never did. Oops! (Hey, why let reality get in the way of a good story.)

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Olympia Boycott – Worse Than You Think

Jon Haber
Divest This!
25 July '10

At first, I assumed the Olympia Co-op boycott was just another case of a well-meaning, but naïve organization giving a boycott group a friendly hearing and ending up becoming their hand-puppet. But the more I learn about what’s been going on at Olympia, the more this begins to look like one of the most appalling cases of BDS infection I’ve ever come across.

To start with, at the meeting where the boycott was decided (a meeting that included 40+ BDS supporters and not one member of the community that could represent a differing opinion – a shocking situation in and of itself) an early draft of the boycott proposal apparently anticipated that this action would divide the organization’s membership.

In other words, the co-op’s leaders not only were aware that an Israel boycott could be divisive within the membership, but fully anticipated the damage their action would cause. But they did it anyway, taking into account only the opinions of the BDSers in the room and ignoring the 15,000 other members the board was allegedly elected to represent.

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BDS's Latest Victim

Jon Haber
Divest This!
21 July '10


OK - Another institution has decided to take the plunge into the BDS waters. So let’s all set our watches for what is going to happen next.

The Olympia Co-op story is similar to Somerville and Berkeley in that the decision to join the world-wide boycott movement against Israel was made by a group of leaders (the co-op’s board) working closely with BDS activists to craft their decision, but taking into account virtually no one else that the board was supposedly elected to represent.

Now co-op rules apparently say that the board can boycott anyone they like without consulting the membership. So if we are to get into a debate about the board’s responsibility (which we will on another day), it will be a discussion of propriety and judgment vs. breaking the law or the organization’s own rules.

For now, however, we can classify Olympia as comparable to those other BDS “victories” where members of an organization, church, or city wake up one morning to discover that a community in which they’ve been a member for years is now being touted on Al Jazeera as holding a political opinion (such as the BDS Israel=Apartheid analogy) that many members finds abhorrent .

Apparently a meeting will be held in early August to discuss the decision the Co-op has already made regarding handing their reputation over to the boycott brigade. If history is any guide, this will lead to a second meeting and then finally a third when the co-op (which by now will have realized the consequences of their original decision) will have to vote to reject or double-down on this ill-conceived boycott project.

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