Opinion

‘Militant sanctimonious fascist hippies’

The Park Slope Food Co-Op near Prospect Park in Brooklyn is not like your ordinary neighborhood Buy N’ Large. Few grocery stores on earth are as sustainably eco-adoring, cruelty-abjuring, social consciousness-raising, people-powered and nuclear-free as this communitarian improvement on utopia.

The co-op has its own newsletter, the Linewaiters’ Gazette, where writers with names like Willow inform the members (who, in exchange for the right to shop there, must also work shifts, typically 2 3/4 hours a month) about such groovy concepts as “Bicycle Commuting [and] Grocery Shopping by Bicycle,” “the Safe Food Committee Film Night” and the “People’s Alliance Federal Credit Union.” Also, predictably, since collectivism and bureaucracy go together like fair-trade coffee and vegan organic soy milk, happenings like, “the PSFC FEB meeting” at which “the GM will consider a proposal to join the BDS movement.”

Lost in the thud and clatter of earnest gray newsletter prose is the news that the Park Slope Food Co-Op is considering whether to throw its weight behind solving the problem of the Middle East.

That bland-sounding “BDS movement” is a little dash of hate sprinkled on the Haight-Ashbury feel of the co-op. It’s a proposal to ban all Israeli products from the store, an idea that has been kicking around for three years and has finally been placed on the agenda for urgent discussion at the co-op’s monthly meeting on March 27.

That’ll be fun; bring a Kevlar jacket.

BDS stands for an anti-Israel “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.” Says its website: “We believe that long-term, BDS at the Coop should be valid until the occupation ends, Palestinians’ right of return is respected, and Palestinians enjoy just and peaceful self-determination, or until the international boycott call has ended, whichever comes first.” (That “Palestinian right of return” — a cheeky fantasy proposal that would end the Jewish nature of Israel — is about as likely to occur as Manhattan Island being restored to the Indians.)

A leader of the BDS movement in Park Slope is “Hima B,” whose website refers to her as a former stripper and “intradependent” filmmaker. This week, thanks in part to her efforts (“Carrying Israeli goods without making an explicit decision to do so is, in essence, voting in support of Israel’s actions,” says the BDS site, with logic somewhere between “questionable” and ”moronic”), the co-op agreed to hold a vote on whether to schedule a referendum. The meeting will be held at the Brooklyn Technical High School in Fort Greene because (awkward!) the co-op normally holds its meetings in a synagogue across the street. No doubt Israel will begin withdrawing from the West Bank the next day.

“This is a very, very, very small group of people,” notes co-op member and former Brooklyn Paper editor Gersh Kuntzman. “It literally could be like five people trying to get this on the agenda. We only get a few products from Israel, and they’re from quote-unquote good companies. They’re good corporate citizens. Would I vote for Netanyahu? Probably not, but I can’t hold these companies responsible for what Netanyahu does.”

He recalls a previous argument over beer sales in the co-op, which has banned Coca-Cola, bottled water, plastic shopping bags and Nestle baby formula for assorted crimes against liberalism. “Some Muslim members were offended by alcohol sales,” he says. Solution, after much debate: “We sell beer. You don’t have to buy it.”

Wait, you mean freedom to choose? Nah, that wouldn’t do at the wonderland run by and for the people the hilarious blog F—ed in Park Slope calls “militant sanctimonious fascist hippies.”

Says reluctant co-op-ista Michele Carlo on the blog, “I’ve never been in the military, lived behind an Iron Curtain or belonged to a religious cult. But I have endured the Indoctrination to FoodCoop: a totalitarian manifesto of endless Rules expounded in excruciating detail . . . And how infraction of the smallest, seemingly most insignificant Rule would result in immediate death — uh . . . suspension — if not complete expulsion.”

Both sides are trying to turn out the vote for the March assembly, but if Google rankings are anything to go by, the counterrevolutionaries with the Stop BDS movement will be able to turn back the anti-Israel brigade. Jon Haber, who runs the pro-Israel blog Divest This and has been trying to thwart proposed BDS boycotts around the country since 2004, says, “Once there’s a controversy, you get lots of people coming out of the woodwork,” he says. “They’re always the same. I’ve been to several of them. Hundreds of pro- and anti-Israel activists swarm the area. You see neighbors who previously were perfectly nice to each other divided into sort of armed camps, waving bloody photos at one another.”

Things have a way of getting out of hand when you import Middle East politics along with hummus. Is a perpetually undergraduate state of flaming indignation and the politicization of everything really worth the trouble, Park Slope utopians?