Olympia co-op votes to boycott Israeli products Joel Magalnick • Editor, JTNews Posted: July 21, 2010 |
“On the one hand, I’m troubled by it because I don’t agree with the outcome. I don’t support boycott as a tactic,” said Rabbi Seth Goldstein of the Reconstructionist Temple Beth Hatfiloh. “On the other hand, I’m also troubled by the process in the sense that it really wasn’t an open process and that the membership was not brought into that conversation.”
Goldstein, whose family has held co-op membership for about eight years, said there has been a lot of talk within Olympia’s small Jewish community about a response.
“People feel a real desire to address this issue,” Goldstein said. But, he added, “There obviously is a diversity of opinion.”
Goldstein’s wife, Yohanna Kinberg, associate rabbi at Bellevue’s Temple B’nai Torah, said the family plans to drop its membership following a public discussion about the boycott.
The resolution was promoted over the course of two board meetings by members of an organization called Olympia BDS, which, according to its Web site, “is a grassroots network of community members in Olympia, WA, joining the call by Palestinian civil society for a non-violent, global movement of boycott, divestment, and sanctions of Israel, until it meets the requirements of human rights and international law.”
“We’re not asking the co-op to institute a boycott on their own,” said Andrew Meyer, an organizer with Olympia BDS, referring to the movement that has been growing since the early part of the last decade. “We’re asking them to support a boycott that already exists.”
Co-op officials did not respond to repeated requests for an interview, but board member Harry Levine told The Olympian newspaper that nine of the 10 board members voted in favor of the boycott. Levine, who is Jewish, did not take a stand on the issue, but told The Olympian he supports the boycott.
A statement posted on the co-op’s Web site regarding the boycott stated it would also “refrain from dealing with non-Israeli companies that sell products or services to Israel that are used to violate the human rights of the Palestinians.”
One product made in Israel, Peace Oil, is an olive oil made in a joint venture between Israelis and Palestinians. It will remain on the shelves.
This is not the first attempt in Washington State that pro-boycott groups have made to remove Israeli products from food cooperative shelves. Earlier this year, the Central Co-op, which runs the Madison Market in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, killed a proposal on its product issues committee. After several contentious open meetings and a barrage of phone calls, the committee leadership decided that further consideration would damage the co-op and had become “a malignancy to our business,” according to former committee member Rick Bannerman.
Rob Jacobs, director of the Pacific Northwest chapter of the StandWithUs Israel advocacy organization, was active in countering the arguments set forth by proponents of the Madison Market boycott. This one took him by surprise, however.
“What I understand at this point is that last week, without any public notice and without letting their membership know, they were deciding to do this,” Jacobs said.
Meyer, of Olympia BDS, said his organization’s members had done extensive outreach to staff members of the co-op, as well as to volunteers, however.
“They’re responsible for understanding what’s going on within the co-op and being able to communicate that to members,” Meyer said.
The last two board meetings filled the room, Meyer said, and “no less than 75 percent of the meeting were members of the co-op.”
In expressing concern about the way the boycott was handled, both Rabbi Goldstein and Jacobs noted the founding principles of the co-op movement and its commitment to a democratic process. Both believed that process was subverted in this case.
With the vote having passed, the co-op board has since announced a meeting on Aug. 11 at The Olympia Center. Meyer said his group would also be hosting an event on August 4, as well as having an ongoing presence at the two store locations with information about the boycott.
“The process of engaging the community and making sure the people will have the opportunity to voice their opinions is ongoing, and that won’t be coming to an end anytime soon,” he said.
That’s a sentiment that likely won’t comfort people opposed to the boycott. Jacobs said he had contacted the Israeli consulate in San Francisco to see if they could send speakers, but didn’t have much optimism that any representatives would be able to set forth counterarguments.
There’s “no need to hear from anybody that supports Israel because they already know all the information and they don’t need to hear anybody from the bad guys’ side telling them something that they won’t believe anyway,” Jacobs said.
Organizers also cited Rachel Corrie, an Olympia woman killed in Gaza in 2003 while protesting Israel Defense Forces polices, as an inspiration for the boycott.
And while some of the co-op’s leadership takes pride in being the first market to boycott Israeli products, they’re not the first in Olympia to take action against what they call Israel’s oppressive policies. In June, students at The Evergreen State College voted overwhelmingly to divest from companies “that profit from Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine” as well as to ban construction equipment manufactured by Caterpillar, which sells its products to the Israeli government, from campus.
The board of The Port Townsend Food Co-op has posted its plans to discuss the issue of a boycott on Sept. 7.
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