PSFC Board of Directors Election

If you are a member of Park Slope Food Coop, you probably received an email on May 24 with voting instructions for the upcoming elections for 2 open positions on the Board of Directors.

Vote "YES" for Ramon Maislen and Sondra Shaievitz. They are the Coop 4 Unity candidates. They have most experience and years of membership than all the other candidates. They will protect our Coop.

Make sure to vote "NO" for Tess Brown-Lavoi and Keyian Vafai. They are the candidates from the group that wants to boycott Israel. We don't know what they would do if elected to the Board, and we don't want to find out!

Sign up for the Coop 4 Unity email list and/or WhatsApp group, 

12 Years Later - It's Deja Vu All Over Again

They're back. Or should I say there is a new crop of adorable children trying to get the Coop to endorse the BDS movement. The brutality of the October 7 attacks has roused their blood, and they feel emboldened to attack the Jews in Brooklyn. Perhaps not physically - yet. 

And so, we are organizing and fighting back. And we will succeed.

NYC City Council to Vote on anti-BDS Resolution

Resolution 1058-A, “A resolution condemning all efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel and the global movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction the people of Israel.” is scheduled for a vote on September 14 by the New York City Council.

I hope this will pass and I hope the members of the Council's Progressive Caucus will vote for it as well.  BDS falsely markets itself as a "progressive" cause.  Too many progressives are duped into supporting BDS because of confirmation bias and lack of knowledge about  a complex issue.

Let's be clear. Bigotry is not progressive.  Discrimination is not progressive. Defamation is not progressive.  Ignoring, denying or justifying violence is not progressive.  Denying history is not progressive. Distorting and selectively quoting international law is not progressive.

The BDS movement ignores the role of Arab anti-Jewish attitudes in the development of opposition to legal Jewish settlement in the Land of Israel during the pre-State and Ottoman periods.  The BDS movement denies the Jewish people their identity as a unique group with a national history and right to self-determination.  The BDS movement singles out the world's only Jewish for opprobrium.  The BDS movement falsely represents Israel.  The BDS movement ignores the existence, incitement and actions of Palestinian terror groups dedicated to targeting and murdering Jews - anywhere in the world.  The BDS movement's activities on American college campuses correlates with acts of violence, harassment and intimidation of Jewish students.

This is from the testimony of New York City Jewish Community Relations Council CEO Michael Miller to the Council last week.

BDS tactics are one-sided and are focused solely on eliminating Israel. BDS turns a blind eye to Palestinian actions which seek to undermine a two state solution, such as terrorism, indiscriminate rocket fire on civilian areas, repeated refusals to negotiate for peace, and unfortunate rejections of Israeli offers for Palestinian statehood. Rather than focusing on improving the situation for both peoples, BDS activists sabotage the internationally-backed peace process  hat is premised on advancing mutual understanding and respect between the parties.

Economic boycotts and divestment actions will not help the Palestinian people. The path to the two-state solution depends on creating an atmosphere of peace and reconciliation combined with economic development and political achievement. Blocking that path is the BDS Movement.

If you believe in the right of the Jewish people to be safe and secure in their historic homeland, I urge you to support this resolution.

If you believe in the right of the Palestinian people to their own state alongside, but not instead of, Israel, I urge you to support this resolution.

If you believe in a true peace process and oppose divisive, destructive tactics that attempt to cripple our ally Israel, I urge you to support this resolution.

If you believe that together, we can play a constructive role in ensuring that Israelis and Palestinians can work toward achieving mutual understanding, cooperation, and a better future for themselves, their children, and their grandchildren, I urge you to support this resolution.

If you are a New York City resident please contact your Council representative and say you support Resolution 1058-A

BDS Does Not Belong in the Park Slope Food Coop

I submitted the following letter to the Coop's biweekly newspaper., the Linewaiters' Gazette (LWG).  It was rejected for publication. I will address the reasons given for rejection in a separate post.

“Zionists should be sent to the gas chambers,” someone wrote on a bathroom wall at UC Berkeley – ground-zero of the BDS movement in the United States. “Death to Israel,” “Kill all the Jews” and multiple swastika graffiti have also been found on the Berkeley campus. These are the fruits of the hate promoted by the BDS movement.

Apparently it is a crime worthy of genocide to recognize the Jewish People as a distinct national group with a unique history, language, and culture, and to support their right to self-determination and self-preservation as an indigenous people in a portion of their ancestral homeland that is source of their culture. Further, by calling for this genocide is to be carried out using the same mechanism specifically designed by the Nazis for the extermination of the Jews 75 years earlier, the writer implies approval for the actual murder of one-third of world Jewry.

In our own Coop, a BDS supporting member has publicly expressed the desire that Orthodox Jews not be Coop members. In the Gazette, BDS members have:

• called for the support of a leading member of the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (3/8/12,p.6).
• equated Israel with Nazi Germany (12/11/14, p.7).
• told Jews how they should understand their Jewishness (8/21/14, p.13 & 10/30/14, p.13)
• called for the dismantling of Israel (6/16/11, p. 10).

None of this has any relation to Palestinian human rights. None of this can be called “criticism of Israel.”

Well-intentioned people may support the BDS movement because they believe they are supporting Palestinian human rights. However, the BDS movement does not promote rights or democracy. It seeks to portray Israel’s very existence as incompatible with human rights. In doing so, it works to justify attacks upon Israel and Israel’s supporters.

In April, former U.S. Treasury Terrorism Analyst Jonathan Schanzer testified before Congress that the funders of the BDS movement in the US were also funders of Hamas, the terrorist group whose charter calls not only for the elimination of Israel but also the murder of ALL JEWS everywhere. The BDS movement is a part of a century-old effort of an elite, despotic Arab leadership to maintain its hegemony. The BDS movement works to further entrench a Palestinian leadership that has enriched itself through the prolongation of the conflict at the expense of the Palestinian people.

This is why so many of us oppose the BDS movement, and why I labeled it a “vicious racist movement.” This is not speech that should be protected in the Coop. The GCs’ decision to no longer allow the use of the meeting room for BDS-related activities is a wise one and a step in the right direction for returning normalcy to the Coop.

If you agree it is time to end the promotion of the BDS movement in the Food Coop, then please add your name to my petition.

Is Anti-Zionism a form of Anti-Semitism?

The Pope's answer:

In an email we got from Pope Francis:"Whoever does not recognize the Jewish People and the State of Israel falls in antisemitism"

— Henrique Cymerman (@Henrique_B_C) May 28, 2015

and on October 28, 2015, Pope Francis said at a meeting with Jewish leaders to mark the 50th anniversary of Nostra Aetate

“To attack Jews is anti-Semitism, but an outright attack on the State of Israel is also anti-Semitism.  There may be political disagreements between governments and on political issues, but the State of Israel has every right to exist in safety and prosperity.”

And President Obama, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, in the Atlantic

On Israel, Obama endorsed, in moving terms, the underlying rationale for the existence of a Jewish state, making a direct connection between the battle for African American equality and the fight for Jewish national equality. “There’s a direct line between supporting the right of the Jewish people to have a homeland and to feel safe and free of discrimination and persecution, and the right of African Americans to vote and have equal protection under the law,” he said. “These things are indivisible in my mind.”

In discussing the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe, he was quite clear in his condemnation of what has become a common trope—that anti-Zionism, the belief that the Jews should not have a state of their own in at least part of their ancestral homeland, is unrelated to anti-Jewish hostility. He gave me his own parameters for judging whether a person is simply critical of certain Israeli policies or harboring more prejudicial feelings.

“Do you think that Israel has a right to exist as a homeland for the Jewish people, and are you aware of the particular circumstances of Jewish history that might prompt that need and desire?” he said, in defining the questions that he believes should be asked. “And if your answer is no, if your notion is somehow that that history doesn’t matter, then that’s a problem, in my mind. If, on the other hand, you acknowledge the justness of the Jewish homeland, you acknowledge the active presence of anti-Semitism—that it’s not just something in the past, but it is current—if you acknowledge that there are people and nations that, if convenient, would do the Jewish people harm because of a warped ideology. If you acknowledge those things, then you should be able to align yourself with Israel where its security is at stake, you should be able to align yourself with Israel when it comes to making sure that it is not held to a double standard in international fora, you should align yourself with Israel when it comes to making sure that it is not isolated.”

Anti-BDS Letter from Hillary Clinton

A number of news media outlets have already picked up a letter from Hillary Clinton to Haim Saban in which Clinton expresses her "alarm over the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement."  Saying "we need to repudiate efforts to malign and undermine Israel and the Jewish people," Clinton asks Saban for advice on how to work "across party lines" to fight back against BDS.

Read the full letter below or download here.

For the Media

May 11, 2015 - This morning I woke up to find an editorial in the New York Daily News about  the  latest BDS effort at the Park Slope Food Coop.  The editorial is based on a report appearing at the The Indypendent written by a Food Coop member who attended the April General Meeting.  The editorial contains no original first hand reporting.

I love reporters.  I envy your writing abilities.  I had a great time talking to reporters three years ago. But I also have a day job.  This time please send your questions to my email stopbdsparkslope at gmail.com.  We will try to send you answers within 24 hours.  I think this will work better for everyone.

The Food Coop is an extremely successful experiment.  Starting with a few people 40 years ago who decided to collectively buy wholesale, it has grown into a $50 million/year business, employing some 50 people, and providing them with very competitive salaries and attractive benefits.  In addition, members save thousands of dollars a year on their food bill and we support local agriculture.

The Coop's Mission Statement includes:

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.

We welcome all who respect these values.

Yet, from time to time, for better or worse, because of the nature of Food Coop governance relies on the cooperative spirit and good will of its members, food coops - like colleges - are left vulnerable to exploitation by groups seeking to promote their political causes.  As the the blog Divest This! writes:

One answer has to do with our old friend ruthlessness.  For in a society, such as a college community, that values discourse and assumes people will resolve problems reasonably and amicably, how do you deal with an organization ready to trash the entire enterprise in order to torture and smear their political enemies?

 Please check back here for relevant articles as I post responses to the latest BDS effort.

How To Get Our House in Order
From the Perspective of an Israeli Coop Member