Tag: olympia food cooperative

In the face of condemnations of their boycott pouring in from more and more members, and even the local press questioning a boycott decision that seems to have had so little input from the community, Olympia BDS champion have taken lately to feigning mock outrage over comments that their boycott project involved “outside agitators.” In one sweet (if inept) attempt at political jui jitsu, one such champion has even announced that the only real outside agitator in the conflict is me and this blog.

Where to begin unpacking the notion of who is “out” and who is “in” when analyzing this latest twist in the Olympia Co-op debate?

Let’s begin by noting that attempts to get food co-ops to boycott Israel products have been a major push for the US branch of the global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) “movement” for most of this year, announced on their Web sites and attempted in places like Davis California and elsewhere many months before the matter came up at Olympia.

Given this, are we expected to believe that the Olympia boycott campaign involved no one but local “grassroots activists” and co-op members? That no other members of the worldwide divest-and-boycott scene that the OlyBDS group proudly lists on their Web site were any way involved with activities leading to the recent boycott vote?

Since the boycott vote was taken, Olympia BDSers wasted no time getting individuals and organizations from around the planet to show their support for their campaign. They also seem to have gone into overdrive firing off press releases across the globe insisting, among other things, that other co-ops should follow Oly’s lead.

This is, of course, their right as it is the right of any political organization to try to capitalize on any momentum it generates. But at what point does an allegedly “local” program pulling in re-enforcements from around the planet to (among other things) condemn other members of the community lose its right to claim to be purely on the inside? And does a project like BDS, engaged as it is in butting into other people’s business on a global scale (most recently by insisting that food co-ops in other communities should do what Oly’s done) have a leg to stand on when complaining about “outsiders” criticizing it’s activities and behavior?

Pulling the camera back further, a boycott decision in and of itself is meant to reach a worldwide audience. If this was just a matter of denying members the ability to buy a few Israeli-made crackers, there would be no need for all those press releases. But, point of fact, the Olympia Co-op has decided to have its own publically declared foreign policy which it backs up with the moral weight of the institution.

Having publically declared that Israel is such a horrible place that it alone in all the Middle East deserves to be punished (with the corollary that those of us who support Israel are apologists for a criminal, racist, murderous state), it’s a bit rich to see people start complaining when the accused (including me) decide to respond.

Regarding that response, I should note that I have never posed as a member of the Olympia community, carefully pointing out in my posts and comments that my contribution to the debate is that of someone who has seen these conflicts play out before. In other words, I’ve presented myself as an experienced outsider, not a home boy.

Given that people seem to kvetching about I and other “outsiders” having their say, I’m curious as to just how “inside” these complainers truly are? In all their actions, they represent the global BDS program, not the Co-op, not the town of Olympia and certainly not the many other people in whose names they want to speak. And they are leveraging the voices they have hijacked (including 15,000 Oly Co-op members who never agreed to become part of the BDS “movement”) to get into the face of everyone in the world who in any way cares about the Middle East (including me).

Needless to say, it’s a time-honored political tactic to claim that your side is made up solely of grassroots community members while the other guy’s side is a global conspiracy of people who couldn’t find the community on a map. But in today’s Facebook Age, information travels freely. And if the BDSers consider themselves free to use this technology to play in a global sandbox, they can’t complain when others show up to, among other things, pull back the façade from their pose as representing nothing more than local interests.

While not a member of a food co-op here in Massachusetts, I do take part in a farm share. But when I picked up last week’s supply of tatsoi et al, I couldn’t help but notice a distinct lack of protestors lining the street on my way to the farm. Curious, I checked the Web sites of several local co-ops and found that none of them featured members accusing each other of racism, anti-Semitism, ignorance and apologia for murder.

Even the food co-op at Davis, California, which considered and rejected an anti-Israel boycott a few months back, seemed a joyful place with members on their various Web sites discussing recipes, nutrition tips, and best wishes for the summer (with time left over to announce community service activities such as a blood drive). Why is it that only Olympia seems to be locked in debate that’s includes such enlightening subjects as whom in the Middle East is guilty of genocide, or whether or not the Nazi boycott of Jewish stores was a reaction to Jewish economic warfare against Nazi Germany?

Why is it only at Olympia that members are at one another’s throats? And why is it only at Olympia that co-op leaders have to sort through hundreds of e-mails a day from around the world, demanding they come down on one side of the Middle East conflict or the other? Perhaps it is because, unlike nearly every other retailer (co-op or otherwise) in the country, Olympia decided to turn a conflict that has challenged and perplexed wise and committed men and women for generations into official business.

Now I happen to be 3000+ miles away from Washington State, so perhaps I am missing a wide range of issues that made boycott a requirement for Olympia and almost nowhere else. But given that I’ve been watching and analyzing nearly identical BDS stories as they played out in other communities for 5-6 years now, I think it’s safe to suspect that Olympia’s leadership may be starting to ask itself whether they really know so much more than their colleagues nationwide who have not touched this issue.

Are they wiser than the thousands of people in similar positions who have chosen to keep the Middle East out of their communities, or have leaders outside of Olympia shown wisdom by avoiding taking actions guaranteed to only cause division and pain?

It may be that the Olympia Co-op board is more complicit in this decision than leaders in other civic organizations (such as my former hometown of Somerville, MA) that were essentially tricked into taking a divestment stance (temporarily) at the behest of BDS activists working them behind the scenes. But whether or not this is the case, this same Oly leadership seems to be starting to show concern about taking such a controversial political stance in the name of 15,000 members who had no idea this matter was even being discussed.

Claims that a policy statement here and a by-law there can be looped together to justify making such a controversial choice behind the backs of the membership seem to me (and many Oly members I’ve talked to) as more legalistic backtracking than a satisfying explanation. And making such a decision at a meeting where 50 boycott supporters were present, but no one else knew what would be happening, cannot be satisfactorily justified by criticizing members for not taking the initiative to keep abreast of behind-the-scenes politics (a criticism which sounds a lot like the “didn’t you get the memo?” corporate-speak than the actions of an organization that prides itself on member democracy).

As bad as things have gotten since news of the boycott first escaped to the public, the organization can expect to see the full circus descend during next week’s public hearing on the subject. They can look forward to people who once smiled at each other in the aisles waving bloody shirts and gruesome photographs at one another. People with honest political differences will be branded as “enemies of human rights,” or murderers with “blood on their hands.”

If the co-op’s leadership leaders like what they see next week and want to have it continue for months or years on end, sucking up the time, energy and good will needed to accomplish any other matter, by all means they should let this needless fight continue. But if they want to move the Middle East conflict out of Olympia, they should reverse this decision and determine how to prevent such a poison from entering their community again.

I must admit to a feeling of bewilderment.

As those of you who have been following the Olympia Co-op boycott story on this blog know, I have taken for granted that the Co-op followed its own rules when deciding whether to take part in the latest BDS project to get food co-ops to shun Israeli products.

This is what critics of the boycott were told whenever they brought up the fact that the organization’s membership was excluded from that decision. In fact, I had even urged others to take boycott proponent’s word that procedures were followed properly, asking us all to apply the Principle of Charity in this matter, as well as other matters related to the controversy.

But recent information has come my way which forced me to do something I (possibly naively) chose not to do originally: take a close look at the co-op’s policies on the matter.

If you read through this document (which the co-op itself has posted in order to explain the policies behind its Israel boycott decision) you will see no role for the organization’s board in the decision-making process related to boycotts. Rather, the power to declare a boycott rests solely with the store’s staff and the threshold they must reach to declare an official boycott is consensus. In fact, the only sentence in the policy that specifies where decision-making power rests is the following:

“The department manager will make a written recommendation to the staff who will decide by consensus whether or not to honor a boycott.”

Now in the world most of us live in, consensus is defined as “an opinion or position reached by a group as a whole.” Under this definition, consensus is either/or. Either the group as a whole agrees to something and thus consensus has been reached, or it fails to do so, in which case there is no consensus.

The recent information I have received is that the staff, in fact, DID NOT reach a consensus on whether to boycott Israeli goods. One would think that, by the Co-op’s own published policies, no consensus translates to no boycott. But apparently in this case, no consensus meant that the board intervened to declare one on its own.

A fair-minded commenter on this subject pointed out that the Co-op’s bylaws establish as one of the board’s duties (#16) to “resolve organizational conflicts after all other avenues of resolution have been exhausted” and indicated that this by-law allowed the board to make the boycott decision in light of no consensus being reached by the staff. But this flies in the face of the boycott policy itself which seems to establish “no consensus” as a legitimate position which would translate to a “no go” choice regarding a particular boycott measure.

With all due respect to the person making the case that the conflict-resolution clause of the by-laws gives the board the power to make its own decision in the absence of staff consensus, if we take this proposition to its logical conclusion then anytime the staff cannot reach consensus to go ahead with a controversial matter that is allegedly its choice to make, the board can make that decision for them, a position that essentially makes the staff decision-making power established in the co-op’s boycott policies meaningless.

At this point, I believe everyone deserves a detailed description of what exactly took place within the Olympia Co-op to determine the level of consensus within the staff and (if relevant) what “avenues of resolution” were tried and exhausted before the board set the organization’s boycott policy on its own. Members certainly deserve this information, but so do we outsiders who are now dealing with Olympia’s decision as it is being broadcast around the world as a call for other organizations to also join the BDS program.

Co-op by-laws also include clause #14 which says board members must “maintain free-flowing communication between the Board, Staff, committees, and the membership”.

Let the free-flow of communication begin.