Olympian Folly - In Whose Name?

As noted (and accepted) yesterday, decisions regarding who and what the Olympia Co-op boycotts apparently rests solely with the co-op’s board. I say “apparently” because my only source for this information is co-op members defending that decision online. But the Principle of Charity described yesterday means one should treat such sources of factual information as reliable.

Given this, it’s safe to concede that the board acted within the organization’s rules. (There has also been some debate as to whether the co-op is violating US anti-boycott law in its decision, a less interesting question to me right now, albeit one I’ve taken up in the past.)

So if the co-op’s leadership is playing by the rules, by what right can members (and non-members like myself) be complaining?

Well consider the content of that decision for a moment. Some defenders of the boycott decision claim that we critics are interfering with the free choices of others. But remember that the Oly Co-op board did not make a decision regarding its own personal choice. Each member of the board, indeed each member of the co-op (like all of us) is free to buy or not buy whatever it pleases. If a member wants to not buy Israeli crackers in protest of this summer’s Flotilla incident, a free society allows them to make that decision, just as it would allow another member to stop buying Turkish candy in protest of Turkey’s role that incident.

But the co-op’s board is not making a personal choice. Rather, they are restricting the personal choice of others, just as they would be if they chose to ban all Turkish products, or all products containing honey, or all products that began with the letter “P” from the shelves. Now the claim is that the co-op’s board is allowed to restrict member’s choices based on its own political decisions regarding whom to boycott. But even if the organization’s bylaws allow this exercise of power, the organization’s leadership has an extra obligation - an ethical and moral obligation - to ensure that this limitation of member freedom is in the interest of more than just themselves (or of a loud but potentially small minority of members demanding the board begin a boycott).

More importantly, Oly’s boycott (which even its initiators claim covers a trivial number of Israeli goods) was meant from the beginning to be symbolic. It’s a political act to demonstrate that the Olympia Co-op, as an organization, finds a nation so repugnant that it must be punished economically (even if only in small symbolic ways). Indeed, the message being delivered worldwide by supporters of the boycott is that this is a significant event, a great step forward in the boycotter’s plan to have Israel branded an Apartheid state and punished accordingly.

In other words, the board was not voting on a simple boycott but was rather voting to add the name of the organization to the worldwide BDS program which has as its mission not the furthering of the goals of the Co-op movement, but the furthering of its own goals to de-legitimize the Jewish state. And they were making that decision not in their own individual names, but in the name of everyone who has ever been a member.

Their action, their vote, declared that this boycott represents the Co-op as a whole, not just the board but its members. Going even further, this board is simply the latest of many that have been elected since the Co-op was founded in the 1970s. But in making their decision, they are staking the reputation of the organization, a reputation built on the hard work of hundreds if not thousands of people over the course of decades, to the BDS message.

As I’ve been describing for years, this is what the BDS movement does: it tries to get well-known institutions to take part in some form of boycott or divestment so that the BDSers can claim to be speaking in the name of others, leveraging the reputation of a famous university, a age-old church, a well-known municipality, a popular retailer in order to punch above their own limited weight.

So even if the rules allow the Co-op’s leadership to do so, those leaders have an extra level of obligation to make sure they are not making a statement on a controversial matter in the name of a broad membership whose opinions they do not know. And they have an even greater obligation to not hand over the reputation of the organization – a 30+ year reputation they cannot claim to own by simply being the latest in a long line of elected boards – to the boycotters, simply because they are told (again, loudly) that BDS is their only moral choice.

If we take it as given that the formal rules allow the board to do what it did, we also have to take it as given (seeing how bitterly many members oppose the decision) that this choice was not made after gaining consent (or even talking with) members before attaching the Olympia Co-op’s name and reputation to a project many members find repulsive.

This is not the first time that BDSers have gotten their way by maneuvering the leaders of an organization to act behind the backs of the people they are supposed to represent. If you read through the divestment tale of Somerville, MA (the first BDS battle I fought), you’ll find the same dynamic.

Now Somerville survived that ordeal by coming to its senses after the doors were thrown open to outside opinions and a spotlight shown on the divestment advocates trying to manipulate the city leaders to hand Somerville’s centuries-old reputation to them before the citizenry found out what they were doing. One hopes the same dynamic eventually takes hold in Olympia.