The board of directors of the Davis Food Co-op, one of the nation’s largest cooperative food stores serving the Davis, Calif., community, on March 8 unanimously rejected a proposal by a local group of activists attempting to put a boycott of Israeli food products on a co-op-wide ballot.

This decision was the first time a product boycott targeting Israel was put to the test within the U.S. food market and the co-op movement, and represents a major defeat for forces demanding “boycott, divestment and sanctions” targeted at Israel.

The Davis Food Co-op, a successful, member-owned cooperative with a nearly 40-year history and over 9,000 member-owners, requires that member-sponsored initiatives be both “legal and proper” to qualify for a ballot vote. In February, the co-op ruled that the boycott initiative might put the co-op in legal jeopardy, but last week’s unanimous rejection of the boycott took the important step of listing over a dozen reasons why a vote that determined what members could and couldn’t buy at the co-op represented an improper use of the organization’s initiative process.

These reasons included:

• The initiative would demand that the co-op “accept the global boycott, divestment and sanctions for Palestine campaign’s characterization and judgment of Israeli actions as fact”, and require the co-op to “accept the global BDS campaign’s tactics as our own,” thereby allowing global BDS to determine the co-op’s compliance with its principles and policies. In essence, the board said that it would be forced to turn over the co-op’s “management and operation” to a political movement whose objective has nothing to do the continued viability of the co-op.

• The initiative runs counter to the Rochdale Principles, upon which the cooperative movement was founded. Specifically, the initiative violates the basic principle of political and religious neutrality and the idea that cooperatives should avoid the dangers of meddling in political and religious affairs.

• The initiative demands the co-op make a judgment about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of actions or policies of the Israeli government, particularly with respect to extraordinary actions taken by such government that have been invoked in the name of its national security – a judgment the co-op board feels unqualified to make.

“This was a terrific result,” said Shulamit Glazerman, a co-op member involved with fighting against the boycott effort. “During the months that the boycott drive was active, the BDS campaign generated regular complaints from patrons who resented having the Middle East conflict imported into their organization.”

Jon Haber, who tracks BDS activities on his anti-divestment blog, www.divestthis.com, said, “For over 10 years, the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign has tried to hijack well-respected organizations like universities, churches, municipalities and unions with bait-and-switch tactics that attempt to stuff their anti-Israel propaganda message into the mouth of a well known institution.

“The Davis Co-op now joins a long list of organizations that have rejected these efforts by overwhelming margins,” Haber said.

All Jewish organizations in Davis, as well as many in neighboring Sacramento, supported the opposition campaign, led by the Davis Interfaith Coalition for Peace and Justice in the Middle East.