I’m writing in response to the recent article about Atlas Farm Store’s name change and the reasons behind it [“South Deerfield business adopts new name after Apartheid-Free Communities Pledge,” Recorder, Nov. 18]. Though I was briefly quoted, the story wasn’t able to cover the full scope of my concern about the store owner’s decision to sign on to the anti-Israel “Apartheid-Free” pledge.
It’s important to understand that I am not some faceless servant of an all-powerful Zionist-lobby. I’m one of a small handful of Jewish residents of Franklin County, who has been a long-time shopper at the Atlas Farm Store. I live just down the street, with my wife and young children, on our own homestead farm. As a fellow Jewish farmer, I’m proud of the impact Gideon Porth has made on the cause of sustainable food systems and food security in our community. I’ve appreciated being able to support this local food system as a customer of the award-winning farm store he founded in the name of his grandmother, Chaya Atlas, of blessed memory.
I’m also representative of the broad majority of American Jews — who make far less noise than those at the extremes — in having an intense and complicated connection to the State of Israel. I have few illusions about the brutality of the Occupation or the plight of the Palestinians. I’ve worked for Israeli human rights organizations, bearing witness to oppression, and have family and friends who have served as human shields against settler violence. Like many Israelis themselves, I don’t support the Netanyahu government, and am deeply troubled by many dimensions of the war in Gaza, and the ongoing displacement of Arab communities in the West Bank. Yet I recognize that half of our miniscule global Jewish population calls Israel its home, representing a multicultural array of Jewish backgrounds and traditions, and I feel bound to my siblings there. There are only 15 million of us left in a world of billions of Christians and Muslims, our small number the result of deliberate “curation,” and the existence of one tiny country where our culture is in the majority means more to us than some are able to understand.
It’s been hard to witness the extremism that has developed, particularly over the past two years. When we seek nuance and understanding, we are met with rhetoric and hostility, and are increasingly pushed out of spaces and causes that are meaningful to us by the demand that we turn our backs on Israel as the price of admission. We recognize the sincerity that exists within the Palestinian-solidarity movement — as I’ve said, I overlap with it to some degree — and yet are led to question why so much anger is vented exclusively at the only Jewish state, along with implicit and explicit calls for its elimination, when it’s far from the only bad actor on this devastated globe, and why there is so little effort to understand where we are coming from.
It’s hurtful that this store, a place that meant so much to me and my family, and others in my community, is being turned into yet another polarizing and hyper-politicized arena. Given the prevailing sensibilities of our Valley, I don’t suspect it will hurt the business much. I also don’t think it will impact on-the-ground reality in Israel/Palestine. In practice, the biggest demonstrable outcome will likely be making people like me feel no longer welcomed.
I hope store-ownership will reconsider, and explore a different way forward. If they must take geopolitical stands as a local farm store, and if this is the only conflict they intend to weigh in on, maybe there’s a different approach. Many of us are supporters of Standing Together, an organization of Arabs and Jews who live in Israel/Palestine, and regularly confront extremism from all sides, putting their bodies on the line for coexistence and a just society, in which the aspirations of both Israelis and Palestinians are recognized. We would welcome support from the store for their efforts, in place of their participation in an inflammatory and one-sided symbolic campaign.
I know I am not the only local Jew who feels this way. Perhaps we can also explore the opportunity to meet the storeowner and staff as a group, provided all parties believe there is some chance such a meeting would be productive. This isn’t a question of “giving in to our demands,” but finding a way to realize a moral vision without the alienation and dehumanization of the current approach. That would seem to be a better method of peace-building, and I’d be glad to be a partner to it.
Benjamin Weiner lives in Deerfield.