Who Is Putting Anti-Israel Stickers on Packs of Hummus?

Over the past week, customers at several Brooklyn grocery stores — including Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s — have noticed stickers appearing on packages of Sabra hummus and Dorot Gardens frozen foods that instruct shoppers to “boycott Israeli goods” while adding that the products in question are “contaminated with Zionism and apartheid.” The vandalism follows similar incidents reported this week at three Acme Markets in Pennsylvania, where Sabra products were covered with nearly identical stickers.

Last week on November 30, Yael, a graphic designer living in Brooklyn who did not want to provide her last name, was shopping at the Whole Foods in Gowanus when she saw the yellow anti-Israel stickers on tubs of Sabra hummus. “I went to customer service and asked to speak to the manager, who apologized and removed them from the shelves,” she says. The manager then assured her they were going to check the security cameras to see if they could identify who was tagging Israeli products. “He said, ‘I am disgusted by this — it’s unacceptable,’” Yael recalls.

On Sunday, however, the hummus was still on shelves. Deena, who lives in Carroll Gardens and also preferred not to use her last name, didn’t notice the stickers on the hummus until she was already at home: “It was horrible to pull it out of the fridge and have my children see a tub of hummus with the word ‘contaminated’ on it. It forces conversations about how not everybody likes us. It’s a terrible thing that is happening now.”

At the Trader Joe’s on Court Street, about a mile away from the Gowanus Whole Foods, Dorot Gardens frozen products were vandalized with the same stickers. (A spokesperson for the grocery chain writes, “When we see any stickers added on to products in our store, we remove them,” but declined to answer any further questions.)

Neither Trader Joe’s nor Whole Foods have been able to confirm who is applying the stickers, but they are reminiscent of the actions of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which included defacing hummus and other Israeli products in the past. Sabra, which was founded in 1986, is now owned jointly by PepsiCo and Israeli food maker Strauss Group; Dorot is owned by Kibbutz Dorot in southern Israel.

“I haven’t seen these stickers in a long time,” says Amy Zitelman, who along with her two sisters founded Soom Foods, tahini made in Israel, in 2013. “I recognize that businesses will be okay, if not thrive, with BDS attention, but personally, as a young Jewish woman entrepreneur, it hurts.” She adds, “What is so disturbing is that this is antisemitism masked as a political statement.”

The stickers’ use of the color yellow is evocative of the gold stars Jewish people were forced to wear in Nazi Germany, while the word “contaminated” carries its own connotations. “BDS, as any boycott, can be effective without using hateful language like ‘contamination,’ which is heavily steeped in Jew hatred,” noted one Brooklyn parent

Meanwhile, the Philly Palestine Coalition has been boycotting Israeli- and Jewish-owned restaurants in Philadelphia such as Zahav, Goldie, the Love, and more. On Sunday, hundreds of protesters stopped in front of Goldie, the popular falafel shop on Sansom Street owned by Steve Cook and Israeli-born chef Michael Solomonov. Protesters stuck “Free Palestine” and “This is genocide” stickers on the storefront’s exterior, and began to chant “Goldie, Goldie, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide,” a refrain that quickly went viral.

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro called the incident “blatant antisemitism,” continuing: “A restaurant was targeted and mobbed because its owner is Jewish and Israeli. This hate and bigotry is reminiscent of a dark time in history.”

As for the stickers, “this idea of boycotting a product made in Israel is very simplistic and hateful,” says Rachel Simons, a co-founder of the tahini and halva company Seed + Mill, whose products have not been stickered, but have been the subject of online boycotts before. (Seed + Mills’ tahini is made by a Muslim Arab-Israeli family in Nazareth.) “When you approach such complexity with simplistic stickers you end up hurting the wrong people.”