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Why the Park Slope Food Coop’s BDS Battle Is So Important

Organizers trying to get the iconic store to ban Israeli goods believe in the power of tangible collective action at a moment when doing so feels increasingly difficult.

Ask anyone these days, and they’ll probably agree that we’re living in a time of unprecedented uncertainty.

Wars in Iran and Ukraine, genocide in Gaza, a climate emergency rearing its head across the globe, and creeping inflation making more and more of life feel out of reach—and all the while, AI is churning out an endless flood of disorienting slop and threatens to render many of our careers obsolete.

It can be easy to feel helpless, like we have no control over the tides of change that are leaving us in the dust.

But even amid this atmosphere of tumult, people continue searching for places to exercise their own political agency and cultivate democratic power. And one place that search is playing out is in the aisles of the Park Slope Food Coop, a member-owned neighborhood grocery store in Brooklyn. This coming Tuesday, the coop is holding a series of crucial votes about an issue that has dogged it for years: whether or not to boycott Israeli products in protest of Israel’s ongoing policies of apartheid and genocide.

For the members of Park Slope Food Coop Members for Palestine (PSFC4Palestine) who have organized around this issue for years, the campaign is about more than just holding Israel accountable. It is also about translating widespread moral outrage and a longing for democratic community into tangible collective action at a moment when doing so feels increasingly difficult. And it could serve as a model for those who continue to feel as if they are careening toward a less democratic future.

The Park Slope Food Coop has never been just a grocery store. Since its founding in 1973, it has grown into an actual democratic institution with political responsibilities. The coop’s 16,700 members each volunteer to work a two-hour-and-45-minute shift every six weeks in exchange for discounted groceries and a vote on store policies. And for many coop members, the opportunity to collectively decide everything from what type of music should be played in the store to whether to stock alcohol is even more appealing than cheaper produce and healthier organic snacks.

As coop member, board member, and PSFC4Palestine organizer Tess Brown-Lavoie put it, the coop functions almost like “a small city”—large enough to reflect broader public opinion trends, but small enough for members to still feel that their participation matters.

It should come as no surprise, then, that a trip to the coop does not always feel like an escape from politics. That communal ethos—and the reality that economic choices carry moral and political weight—has long shaped what does, and does not, appear on the coop’s shelves. From its early years, members treated the store as a site of intersectional, global solidarity. In the 1970s and ’80s, the coop joined broader international efforts to boycott South African goods in protest of apartheid. Members also voted to boycott Chilean products under Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, and later took aim at corporations like Coca-Cola over allegations of complicity in violence against Colombian union organizers.

These were not symbolic gestures so much as extensions of the coop’s core philosophy: that a democratic institution, however small, has a responsibility to reflect the values of its members in practice. Boycotts were debated, sometimes vigorously contested, but they were never treated as out of bounds.

In this context, PSFC4Palestine’s years-long effort to bring about a boycott of Israeli products is neither novel nor particularly radical. Rather, it represented a continuation of a long tradition aimed at aligning the coop’s stated values with its everyday practices. But Israel’s defenders—as they so often do—insisted from the beginning that Israel should be treated as an exception.

Calls for the coop to join the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement first emerged in the wake of Israel’s 2008–09 assault on Gaza, which killed more than 1,400 Palestinians. Within a few years, the issue had sparked one of the most contentious political battles in the coop’s history, culminating in a 2012 meeting that drew thousands of members to debate a possible referendum on boycotting Israeli goods. While members in attendance........

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