BOYCOTT DEMOS COUNTERED BY RACISM

Protest/Counter-Protest Demonstrators rally outside Ricky’s NYC in Brooklyn Heights on October 26. At left activists hold signs supporting a boycott of Ahava. At right, an opponent of the boycott. (Photo Shulamit Seidler-Felder).

The Middle East conflict has inflamed college campuses, bedeviled political campaigns and sparked street demonstrations. But cosmetics stores are the latest, and perhaps least likely, sites so far to bear witness to the sprawling nature of this ever deepening dispute.

At Ricky’s NYC in Brooklyn Heights — part of a self-described “edgy, ultra-hip” chain of New York costume and beauty supply stores — protesters banged drums, blew trumpets and marched around with fright masks in front of display windows stocked with bright colored packages of lotions and potions on October 26. The protesters were dramatizing their contention that the store’s Ahava beauty products add an ugly dimension to its offerings. Led by the groups CodePink and Brooklyn for Peace, some 40 demonstrators condemned the Israeli company and the store because Ahava’s products are manufactured at a settlement in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

The anti-Ahava campaign has been going on for more than a year. But at Ricky’s and elsewhere, counter-protesters have now emerged. About 15 of them made a point of buying Ahava products from the store. Then, clustered right next to the anti-Israel group, they chanted slogans such as “Not one inch!” Some carried signs claiming that there was “no such thing as Palestinian people.” As the anti-Israel protesters chanted “Ahava’s a beauty cream killing Palestine’s hopes and dreams,” a gaggle of girls shrieked the words of the Shema prayer in an effort to drown them out.

It’s boycott versus “buycott” in the latest twist to the Israel-Palestinian dispute. But here, shampoo, conditioner and moisturizer have replaced territories, terrorism and occupation as the focus of contention.