Members at a Brooklyn food cooperative voted in favor of a controversial proposal to boycott Israeli goods during an online meeting Tuesday night amid deepening divisions across NYC over Israel and Palestine.
More than 8,000 members of the Park Slope Food Coop — roughly half of the store’s 17,000 shoppers — registered for the hotly anticipated vote that was conducted over Zoom during the grocery store’s May monthly meeting, according to a longtime member.
“This is unprecedented,” said Barbara Mazor, who added that the food coop’s meetings typically cap out at a few hundred members.
A total of 4,780 were cast in favor of the ban, with 1,796 dissenting. Prior to voting on the boycott, members voted 61% in favor of eliminating a requirement that all boycott votes require a supermajority of 75%. The boycott vote itself passed with a 72% majority.
Tuesday’s vote followed weeks of increased tension at the grocery store, with members on both sides of the issue campaigning outside the market’s Union Street entrance and in some cases coming to blows over the proposed ban, according to an email sent by the food coop’s leadership to members on Saturday.
The dispute in brownstone Brooklyn comes against a deepening divide across NYC over the Oct. 7 terror attacks by Hamas and the Israeli invasion of Gaza that followed.
Following the grocery store’s April meeting, the market hired additional security personnel and instituted new entry protocols in response to threatening letters and mail containing “suspicious substances,” the email read.
With the ban approved, the store is now expected to take roughly a dozen Israeli-made products currently there off its shelves, including Ecolove bath products, Equal Exchange olive oil, Osem corn puffs and Soom tahini.
Supporters of the ban styled the boycott as a small gesture of opposition to Israel’s policies in the Gaza and Iran wars and discrimination against the Palestinians.
“It’s about the fact that we’re complicit in what’s happening over there and it needs to stop immediately,” said John Caramichael, 27. “This is what we can do.”
Opponents countered that the proposed boycott is a divisive waste of time. Some also consider it antisemitic to blanketly boycott Israeli products.
“It is just an excuse to show your power,” said Andre Schklowsky, 84, who joined the coop in 1974. “It’s not gonna affect much of what I actually buy. It is just an excuse to divide people.”
The Park Slope Food Coop has a history of engaging in politically motivated boycotts that dates back to 1973 — the year the grocery store was founded — when members voted against stocking their shelves with goods produced in apartheid-era South Africa. Members have since voted in favor of least seven additional boycotts, most recently targeting Citibank in 2018 over the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Efforts by food coop members to boycott Israeli products, however, have proven more controversial. The last time the grocery store put the issue to a vote was in a 2012 referendum, when members voted 1,005 to 653 against the boycott, according to a Brooklyn Paper report.
In 2016, four coop members were suspended more than a year after they interrupted a presentation by pro-Boycott shoppers about SodaStream, an Israeli product then sold at the store.
