The Rainbow Grocery Co-op of San Francisco has initiated a partial boycott of Israeli products. The Co-op's home page says "There is no Israeli boycott - click here for more info", but the >more info page confirms that some of the store's autonomously run departments have chosen to drop Israeli products and that "To the people who made the decision, their concerns were based on human rights violations"
Never mind the validity of the specific concerns over "human rights violations". The store has not indicated that it is imposing similar boycotts on any other countries, so the Jewish state is being singled out, as it so often is. This brings to mind the following image from the 1930s.
"Germans! Defend Yourselves! Don't Buy From Jews!"
On April 1, 1933 the new German government led by Adolf Hitler imposed a boycott on Jewish businesses. The response of the German Jewish community at the time was "Wear The Yellow Badge With Pride". While there is a big difference between a government-led boycott of all Jewish businesses and a limited boycott of Israeli exports by an independent grocery collective, it is a difference of degree and not of kind. And if this boycott goes unchallenged and succeeds, other boycotts will surely follow. This is not an occasion to accept a boycott with pride, but to fight back, to expose this anti-Jewish boycott for what it is and to delegitimize and inflict economic damage on those who are behind it.
The San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council has demanded that the store reverse the boycott immediately. I've never been to this particular store. I'll give them until, say, the end of the week to drop the boycott. If they don't drop the boycott, I pledge to never spend any money there, ever.
Even if you're not in San Francisco, why not give the Rainbow Grocery Co-op a call and explain to them why maintaining such a boycott will only cause severe and permanent damage to their moral health, their reputation and their business prospects. (415) 863 0620
UPDATE: The Chronicle's own Debra Saunders also bashes the Rainbow Co-op in "Food fight in tofu-land"
UPDATE 2 (12/06): The Rainbow Co-op now appears to be lying in an attempt to cover-up the boycott.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at December 05, 2002 08:14 AMThere is a long history of holding Jews to a different standard from the rest of the world. History is replete with such such examples, and this instance, no matter how innocuous or irrelevent, follows the pattern. Although the decision of this supermarket smacks more of asinine stupidity than anti-Semitism, it's not a very thoughtful or honest path to take. Are they going to boycott products from all Arab countries, China, Russia, etc. whose human rights violations far exceed those of Israel? Gee, what would they sell?
Posted by: j on December 5, 2002 08:29 AMYou know, if you were to boycott a co-op like, say, Rainbow, you could rest assured that your actions weren't hurting innocent workers who have no say on company policy.
Posted by: Bill Herbert on December 5, 2002 11:27 AMJust gave it the Full Amish. Even caused myself a nosebleed, I was so pissed off.
Posted by: Laurence Simon on December 5, 2002 03:10 PMThere is a really interesting story about the Nazi Boycott. At the same time there was a Transfer Agreement between Israel and the Nazis. Israel would give money/buy German stuff and the Nazis would let Jews go to Palestine. It worked for some time until the Mufti had it stopped...
If you want to read more about this there is a great book called "Jews For Sale?" by Yehuda Buer.
Umm, JustSomeGuy? Israel diidn't EXIST when the Nazis were in power... What are you talking about?
Posted by: Deoxy on December 6, 2002 07:11 AMTo paraphrase JFK, free people everywhere should proclaim "Ich bin ein Juden".
Posted by: John on December 6, 2002 07:46 AMDeoxy,
When I wrote Israel, I was speaking about pre-State Israel. You know Ben-Gurion and such. They were dealing with Himmler trying to get the Jews out of Germany.
I think you know what I was talking about. Anyway if you are interested read the book.
What an excellent idea,this photo;a picture worth million words.Thanks.
Posted by: bunuel on December 6, 2002 10:41 AMWow! Debra Saunders made sense. What's she doing at the Chronicle?
Posted by: BarCodeKing on December 6, 2002 12:13 PMJust to clairify things a bit. Rainbow Grocery is not a Nazi inspired organization. Nobody knew that they were boycotting Israeli products for a whole year! They kept it a secret because they were ashamed. The story only came out when someone asked about buying Chocolate Geld.
Rainbow is what we should be calling a (self-hating) Assimilationist Corporation!
Anti-corporatism is the same ideology as Anti-semetism--only they have replaced "jews" with "corporations". Like pre-enlightenment jews, corporations have no soul!
--warm regard
Having not read the entire Rainbow Grocery Israeli-product boycott story yet, I don't have all the particulars about it.
I do know that I personally don't boycott anything on basis of nationality. Just because a nation's government actions are wrong in my eyes doesn't mean that the people of that nation necessarily agree with, or approve of, the practices. Or could make the government stop them, even if they tried very hard to get it to do so.
Anti-corporatism is the same ideology as Anti-semitism--only they have replaced "jews" with "corporations". Like pre-enlightenment jews, corporations have no soul!
I am Anti-Corporatist because I don't like authoritarian, totalitarian regimes no matter what the ideology they're based on. I am Anti-Corporatist because not only did Mussolini himself see the corporation as the perfect cornerstone of a repressive fascist regime, it's becoming more and more deeply and painfully apparent each day that the brain-decayed, infantile madman in the White House also sees today's much huger multinational corporations - as well as the metacorporations whose sole purpose is buying them up and amalgamating them into even more gigantic congloms - as the steps on his personal power ladder. While not all corps are soulless (I offer Whole Foods, Rainbow's most robust competitor in San Francisco, as an example of one that is not a bad corp) the truly enormous ones have become more and more so in the past ten years or so. They have all but destroyed small business in America, owing largely to all the help the government loves to give them.
Anti-corporatists aren't anti-business! A lot of us just want to be able to practice business ourselves as well, and not spend all our days at work for companies too large to know their employees or, as is usually the case, to care about them much at all.
Posted by: Monde on June 7, 2004 07:23 PMHow about boycotting a reputable organic frozen fruit company (which I'm sure is represented in the stores freezer) and which just sold out to a giant corporation (General Mills). Perhaps the store's management could actually explain how this Israeli product boycott is actually helping the Palestinian people. Are they sending money to the West Bank or something?
Posted by: Never Mind on August 11, 2004 11:24 AM