BDS Victory at the Park Slope Food Coop in Brooklyn

Sahir Ahmed Faraz

Posted June 2, 2026

The Park Slope Food Coop, a cooperative grocery store in Brooklyn, New York, has, with a resounding majority, passed a resolution to boycott all Israeli goods — both from within the pre-1967 border and the illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories.

The Park Slope Food Coop is not the first US co-op to adopt BDS. That honor goes to the Olympia Food Co-op in Olympia, WA. The Park Slope Food Coop is not even the first Brooklyn co-op to adopt BDS, that honor goes to the Greene Hill Food Co-op. Yet, the Park Slope Food Coop victory is a major one, a measure of which is the worldwide attention it is receiving. Coverage in The Guardian and The New York Times appeared virtually instantaneously after the vote. The much-anticipated vote was covered in significant outlets even before the vote.

The Park Slope Food Coop holds a special place in the cultural landscape of New York and even beyond. The New York Times and The New Yorker regularly run fond stories about its supposed quirkiness. Many public figures are members of the Coop: prominent writers, actors, and politicians. One can get a sense of the importance of the Coop from the recent local headlines concerning the position on the boycott of two local politicians running for Congress, Brad Lander and the incumbent Dan Goldman, only one of whom is a member of the Coop! There is no completely satisfactory answer to the source of the Coop’s cultural cachet, yet, whatever the source, it is incontrovertible that people eagerly follow what goes on at the Coop. Thus, the boycott victory is not only a great one for those of us who are Coop members but also for the BDS movement in general as headlines across the globe testify.

The Park Slope Food Coop model

The Park Slope Food Coop started as a small endeavor of only a few members (fewer than 20) in 1973, from which it has grown into its present size of 17,000. The Coop is not open to the public, and membership is required to shop there. It is located in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, which has gentrified from its humble beginnings into a largely unaffordable area for working-class people. Members of the Coop live as far afield as Manhattan and other NYC boroughs, as well as towns in New Jersey and Connecticut. They find ways of making membership and grocery shopping work, a testament to the Coop’s appeal.

The Coop operates under a highly original model. It is member-owned, and a large fraction of the work is done by member workers who through their membership commit to working two-and-three-quarter hours in every six-week period. The Coop is known for its draconian handling of failures to fulfill one’s work obligations. Missing a shift often means having not only to make up the shift but also to work a second penalty shift. The most mortifying words as one enters the Coop are, “You are on alert,” or worse still, “You have been suspended.” Digging oneself out of a missed-shifts hole requires some effort, not to mention humiliation at the door!

The reasons people join the Coop are manifold, and there are some distinct pleasures of being a member despite the challenges. One is that the markup on products is so low that it is difficult to find better prices for what is on offer. Produce is invariably fresh due to the very high turnover rate. Spices, teas, dried goods are bought in bulk and repackaged into reasonably sized, affordable containers. But what I find most pleasurable is that there is no hierarchy as one walks through the door. The person stocking the shelves, the cashier, the bathroom cleaner are all members just like oneself. Conversely, when one is working, the “customers” or member-shoppers, as we call ourselves, are also just fellow members and sometimes acquaintances, friends, and neighbors. Thus, there is a sense of solidarity, respect and lack of hierarchy between whoever happens to be working a shift and the people shopping.

Another very important aspect of membership and central to the boycott debate is that the Park Slope Food Coop is supposed to be run on democratic principles. While what is bought and sold is under usual circumstances the decision of the full-time staff buyers, individual members can ask to have products introduced, and various member committees, like the Labor or Animal Welfare committees, can ask that buyers uphold certain standards etc. In addition, through the mechanism of General Meetings (GMs), resolutions on changes to how the Coop is run can be introduced. GMs have a reputation for vigorous debate, bad behavior, and the potential to bring about major change. Recent changes introduced through this mechanism include the creation of a “Plastic Reduction Committee.” It is GMs which were central to both the many obstructions and the final passage of the boycott vote.

The Palestine Exception at the Coop

The Park Slope Food Coop conceives of itself as a progressive space. Indeed, over its decades long existence, Coop members have passed resolutions that align with relatively left-wing political views. These commitments led the Coop to boycott South African products starting in 1973, the year of its inception. Similar boycotts against goods from Chile during the Pinochet regime, a ban on Coca Cola products for its many sins, grapes during a farm workers strike, and many other similar boycotts pepper the Coop’s long history. Given this history, one would think that nothing could be more natural than the Coop boycotting Israeli products. Things turned out to not be so simple.

The Palestinian civil society call to boycott, divest from, and impose sanctions on Israel is widely known as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions or BDS movement. The actions taken in response to this call are meant to have political force through their non-violent delegitimization of Israeli apartheid and inducing the isolation of Israel in the world community. The roots of this strategy lie in the lessons learned from similar actions taken against South Africa during apartheid. The same strategy is currently in effect against Russia as it continues its brutal invasion of Ukraine. Indeed, since the beginning of the attack on Ukraine, movements both at local and governmental levels to boycott Russia were instantaneously implemented. Academic and scientific institutions have banned Russian academics from participating in collaborations while displaying their Russian institutional affiliations, thus treating them only as representatives of themselves and not Russian academic institutions. The Coop currently carries no products from Russia and has made that clear to its membership.

In the aftermath of the 2008-2009 horrific 3-week-long Israeli attack on Gaza named by its perpetrators “Operation Cast Lead,” a movement for the boycott of Israeli goods began to take shape at the Coop. Pro-Palestine members sought to have a Coop-wide referendum on a boycott. In order to proceed with the plan, a proposal to have a referendum needed to be passed at a GM. The referendum proposal was finally put forward to Coop members at a GM in 2012. An unusually well-attended GM defeated this “vote to have a vote.” Following this defeat, members tried to achieve more modest goals, such as passing a boycott of SodaStream, an Israeli company operating out of an illegal settlement that had displaced Palestinians. The proposal for the boycott of SodaStream at a GM was violently disrupted and never came to a vote.

In 2016, a highly unusual motion bypassing usual procedures changed the threshold for any boycott to 75% of the vote. The threshold of a 75% “supermajority” for boycotts was specifically crafted to defeat any attempt at boycotting Israeli goods.

The BDS movement was reignited at the Coop in 2023 with the launching of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the escalation of Israeli state and settler violence in the West Bank. The boycott victory on May 26 was hard-won and involved strategic organizing. It was first necessary to remove the many obstacles that had been placed for the express purpose of not letting the boycott vote come to the floor. Many of these anti-boycott hurdles were instigated by the senior Coop staff, particularly the General Manager and General Coordinators of the Coop who abused their access to email lists and their privileges at GMs to propagandize against anything that smelled of the boycott.

Many of the obstacles put in place did not directly pertain to Palestine but to Coop democracy. For instance, a talking point of the anti-boycott forces and the Coop leadership was that it would be very difficult to find a venue large enough to accommodate the likely large number of attendees at any meeting discussing the boycott. A proposal was formulated by pro-Palestine and other groups to allow hybrid meetings to take place so that in-person meetings could be supplemented by Zoom attendance. Although during Covid, GMs were held completely over Zoom, an anti-hybrid meetings contingent formed due to the fear that allowing such meetings would overcome a major obstacle to bringing the boycott vote to the floor. This despite the obvious democratic benefits of allowing multiple forms of attendance at GMs. Historically, GM attendance had been low due to timing, location, and other accessibility issues.  When a meeting to decide on whether to allow hybrid meetings was finally scheduled, it had to be cancelled because the venue for the in-person meeting received threats and warnings that violence could erupt at a meeting held on their premises. Clearly, the anti-boycott forces were behind these threats. It was finally decided to allow hybrid meetings through a referendum, which passed with essentially a two-thirds majority.

Once meetings were allowed to be hybrid, the next obstacle was to get rid of the undemocratic 75% threshold for boycott votes and then to finally vote for the boycott. The pro-Palestine group within the Coop (PSFC for Palestine) brought two resolutions to the floor to be voted on in order: (1) the restoration of a simple majority for boycott votes and (2) a resolution to boycott all Israeli goods. As per Coop policy, the case was made for the two resolutions at the April GM and the vote finally took place on Tuesday, May 26. Over 8000 members registered for the meeting, an unprecedented number. Although the reasons are not entirely clear, only about 7000 members attended the meeting on Zoom. The tally for both votes was overwhelmingly in favor of restoring a simple majority for boycott votes and the complete boycott of Israeli goods. The latter won with an over two-thirds majority, thus an incontrovertible victory for the BDS side.

Although the vote finally took place and the results were decisive, the final meeting was not without irregularities perpetrated by anti-boycott forces and the senior staff. The General Manager’s report, which is supposed to be only about the health of the Coop, particularly its finances, ended with a personal admonishment that to vote for the simple majority resolution could result in a mass exit of members, internal strife and the need for restructuring the amount of labor required of members. This behavior was called out, but the Chair of the GM decided to let it pass. A second, even more disturbing incident took place at the end of the meeting when the Coop Board is supposed to vote on the decisions taken by the membership. This is a formality since the Board is there to represent the membership and thus reflect membership wishes as expressed in their votes. Nevertheless, one Board member voted against approving the boycott vote, and the General Manager abstained, both actions representing major departures from established practice.

I am proud to be a member of the Park Slope Food Coop and to be in community with principled people who, despite the enormous pressure to side with Israel in all matters, chose to be on the side of justice, against the erasure of Palestinian existence and suffering, and for the right of Palestinians to resist through BDS. The step taken by the Park Slope Food Coop is a small one but it is part of a striking fissure in a crumbling pro-Israel consensus. I hope the unbearable horror being perpetrated against Palestinians will be brought to an end immediately. If nothing else, this vote shows that Brooklyn as a redoubt of pro-Israel sentiment does not exist and our representatives don’t reflect the values of New Yorkers.

Sahir Ahmed Faraz is the pen name of a member of the Park Slope Food Coop.