Why the Critics Are Wrong - Olympia Food Co-op Boycotts Israeli Goods

On July 15, the Olympia Food Co-op Board of Directors decided to boycott Israeli goods at their two locations in Olympia, Washington. The July 15 meeting was packed with Co-op members when the Board reached this consensus. The Co-op becomes the first US grocery store to publicly join the international grassroots movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) on Israel for its human rights abuses. AC / JSC

Critics of the Olympia Food Co-op’s recent decision to boycott several Israeli products until Israel ends its inhumane occupation of Palestinian land and its suppression of Palestinian human rights have no moral or ethical basis to criticize the Food Co-op unless they can offer an alternative strategy to end Israel’s occupation. Until they do so, they are simply embracing and providing cover for the injustices of Israel’s occupation, whether they are willing to admit it or not.

Everyday, Israeli soldiers arrest and assault Palestinians in their own cities and towns, many of whom are tortured or forced into becoming collaborators with the occupation. Everyday, Israeli armored bulldozers destroy Palestinian homes, orchards and wells in order to clear land to build more Jewish settlements and their massive road infrastructure on Palestinian lands. Everyday, Israeli checkpoints and walls deny Palestinians access to essential food and medical supplies and deny them the right to travel freely between their own towns and to conduct basic life functions. Everyday, Palestinian lives are torn apart by Israel’s occupation. All of these practices are illegal under international law and all are condemned by international human rights organizations and institutions.

And for what reason? It is now clear that the primary function of these Israeli actions is not security but to steal Palestinian land for Israeli settlements and repress Palestinian opposition to this project, forcing Palestinians to live in ever shrinking enclaves. If Israel truly wanted security and peace rather than Palestinian land, it could easily accept the internationally accepted terms for peace and withdraw all of its over 400,000 settlers and soldiers to its 1967 borders with international guarantees for its security. But Israel has chosen settlement and stealing Palestinian land over peace and security. As with other national liberation movements, some Palestinians have indeed committed reprehensible crimes against Israelis, but the moral burden is always greater for the more powerful and oppressive, as it always has been in cases of colonization and dispossession...

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Steve Niva @'Counterpunch'

Thankfully the ball is starting to roll, the huge weight of Israeli oppression that hangs over the lives of the Palestinian people and casts a noxious shadow over the rest of the world is being challenged in one small way, the boycott of Israeli goods by the Olympia Food Co-op and their reasons for taking on this task will hopefully have the desired/required downhill snowball effect of gathering many more businesses along the way. As Steve Niva rightly points out, the mirrors and smoke sham of defence that masks the viscious land grabs by Israel is an International provocation of world leaders, the absence of rebuke by these self-same world leaders is an unconscionable act that denies the Palestinian people all vestiges of our shared humanity. The actions of the Israeli government, under the guise of religious doctrine, does not even adhere to their own religion's Ten Commandments(steal,covet,murder,bear false witness). The out-clause that Non-Jewish people lack a soul, or can be justifiably murdered, stolen from, etc. is the same hypocritical nonsense that was used by the Nazis to justify white supremacism and advocated the very same horrors which followed, racial cleansing, or in this modern scenario, religious cleansing. The actions of the Israeli government and the unrelentingly, tortured stories of Jewish treatment during World War 2 are cruelly mimicked, with those once victims now the most cruel of new oppressors. Israeli politicians deliberately starving the Palestinian people, deliberately stealing Palestinian land, deliberately brutalising children, the elderly, men and women alike, deliberately denying adequate shelter, water and sanitation. If these are the workings of the soul and spirituality of Israel, they are the work of the devil. BOYCOTT ISRAEL NOW.