Tsafrir Abayov/AP Photo
An Israeli shops at the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory in the Be’er Tuvia industrial area.
Earlier this week, a consortium of 17 newspapers, including The Washington Post in the United States (following on reporting in the Times and working from a list provided by Amnesty International and the organization Forbidden Stories), came out with a blockbuster report explaining that an Israeli spyware company called the NSO Group had provided software to a number of authoritarian governments that allowed them to “target journalists, dissidents and opposition politicians. The Israeli government also faced renewed international pressure for allowing the company to do business with authoritarian regimes that use the spyware for purposes that go far afield of the company’s stated aim: targeting terrorists and criminals.”
Immediately, according to Axios, “the Israeli government form[ed] a special team to manage the fallout.” At that point, Israeli officials judged the stories—of which there were literally dozens across all the newspapers—to be, in Axios’s words, “primarily a media crisis for Israel. But senior Israeli officials are concerned it could morph into a diplomatic crisis.”
Fortunately for Israel’s defenders in the United States, within a day, instead of having to defend illegal spying on journalists and human rights workers the world over, they instead got to argue about … ice cream. That was due to the decision by Ben & Jerry’s and that of its parent company, Unilever, to announce that they would no longer allow its ice cream to be sold in the occupied West Bank.
The reactions immediately went to 11.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog called the move “economic terrorism.” Foreign Minister Yair Lapid termed it “shameful surrender to antisemitism.” Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said, “Ben & Jerry’s has decided to brand itself as the anti-Israeli ice cream.” Bennett also “made it clear that he views with utmost gravity the decision by Ben & Jerry’s to boycott Israel and added that this is a subsidiary of Unilever, which has taken a clearly anti-Israel step.”
The Israeli government’s chosen avenue of attack led through a series of local laws passed in the U.S. in a panic, designed to combat the all-but-nonexistent threat to Israel from the almost wholly ineffective Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Gilad Erdan, “sent a letter to each of the 35 governors of states that have passed laws against boycotting Israel, urging them to sanction Ben & Jerry’s.”
The so-called “pro-Israel” professional Jewish community naturally jumped into the breach on behalf of this extraordinary request from a foreign government, instructing U.S. localities how to run their foreign policies. “I’m sure there’s lots of soap, dishwashing detergent and Lipton iced tea and other products in the Unilever umbrella, that are purchased by state prisons, state hospitals, state universities and other state entities that would very much be called into question as the boycott takes hold,” said William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. AIPAC complained about Ben & Jerry’s “discriminatory” act, and the American Jewish Committee chimed in with its assessment of what it deemed to be a “shameful surrender to the … bigoted BDS Movement, which 80% of American Jews see as infected with antisemitism.” And the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) professed to see in the ice cream boycott a “dangerous campaign that seeks to undermine Israel.”
Naturally, the Republican Party could not resist the urge to demonstrate its devotion to all matters Israel, regardless of how little sense they may have made. Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar announced on Thursday that his office will review state law to determine if Ben & Jerry’s or its parent company, Unilever, had taken “specific action” that would force the state to include either company on a list of those companies that boycott Israel. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) appeared to urge his state to not only enforce its anti-BDS law against Ben & Jerry’s, but also to ban the brand’s sale in the state entirely. In New York, Bill de Blasio continued to contribute to his reputation as an increasingly spineless suck-up, with a statement that he “will not be eating any more Cherry Garcia for a while”—referring to one of the brand’s best-known flavors. He called Ben & Jerry’s decision “sad,” and continued, “BDS is a movement that will undermine peace in the Mideast. It’s as simple as that. You cannot have peace if you undermine the economic reality and create divisions. I just believe that’s absolutely the wrong approach and Ben and Jerry shouldn’t be doing that.”
The thing is, B&J’s move is not consistent with BDS. BDS demands a boycott not of the occupied territories but of all of Israel. The BDS movement does not accept the legitimacy of the state of Israel and does not distinguish between the lands Israel conquered in 1948—when the Israelis accepted the U.N.’s proposed partition agreement and the Palestinians and Arab states did not—and those conquered by Israel and occupied since 1967, when Egypt, Syria, and Jordan attacked Israel and were soundly defeated in six days. This is not to argue that the Israelis were innocent in either war, or that either one was entirely defensive; only that there were two wars, and until recently most of the world, including the United States, has considered Israel’s pre-1967 borders to be by and large legitimate, and its occupation of the West Bank, and until recently Gaza, illegal.
Ben & Jerry’s move is not consistent with BDS. BDS demands a boycott not of the occupied territories but of all of Israel.
What the BDSers, the current Israeli government, and its supporters in the U.S. are now arguing is that there is no more “Green Line” separating Israel and the occupied territories. Most of the BDS legislation passed by the states, as well as the laws proposed (but not passed) in Congress, purposely fails to allow for any distinction between the pre- and post-1967 borders. Neither do Israel’s laws making it illegal to support BDS and barring entry to anyone who it believes to support it. (I have written of my opposition to both BDS as well as to any laws that seek to curtail its proponents’ right to free speech here, here, and at some length here, among other places.)
There is therefore an unholy alliance between Israel’s right-wing supporters who wish to see Israel continue what numerous human rights groups (both inside Israel and globally) have named apartheid, and those BDS-supporting groups that wish Israel would just somehow disappear and be replaced by a peace-loving, Kumbaya-singing “Free Palestine From the River to the Sea.” Ben & Jerry’s targeted boycott has therefore exposed the hypocrisy of so many who profess to support a two-state solution where Israel and some future Palestinian mini-state can live side by side. The boycott supports this vision, by insisting on the maintenance—if only psychologically—of a line of separation between Israel and its illegal, anti-democratic, and morally destructive military occupation of the population it has consistently sought to displace. This is exactly what is undermined by statements like that of Marc Stern, chief legal officer for the American Jewish Committee, who argues that “selective boycotts are just as illegal as total boycotts.”
By taking this position, these same groups, as well as U.S. and Israeli politicians, are endorsing the view that Israel, itself, is a country ruled by an apartheid regime. There is no question that the Palestinians live under an entirely different—and far less free—regime in the West Bank than do the Israeli settlers, to say nothing of the massive difference in living standards, the enforcement of laws, and the history of illegally expropriated land. (The recent 213-page, 900-plus-footnoted Human Rights Watch report entitled “A Threshold Crossed” makes this point inarguable, as I note here.) If those lands constitute “Israel” rather than a temporary occupation of lands being held for security reasons until a peace agreement can be worked out—which is the official position of most American Jewish organizations and the U.S. government—then they should be cheering Ben & Jerry’s and rushing out to buy their Cherry Garcia and Phish Food in bulk, to thank them for reminding Israel to reverse the destructive path it has taken in recent decades toward de facto annexation of the West Bank and destruction of the possibility of a two-state solution. But as my friend (and Orthodox Jew) Joshua Shanes put it plainly on his Facebook page (though you should also read his essay in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz): “If the settlements are Israel, than Israel is not a democracy. If the response is ‘but Hamas’ or ‘but security,’ the answer (in part) is that this is an excuse for denying democracy, not a refutation of this basic fact. Israel is not simply patrolling the West Bank. It is settling and annexing it, according to its own admission. Either the West Bank is Israel, or it is not.”
If we are to retain our increasingly besieged belief in a future where two states might one day live together in peace and dignity, and for Israel to become a genuinely democratic nation, then we all owe a debt of gratitude to our friends Ben and Jerry and their brave willingness to put their ice cream where our values ought to be.
I’m over my limit again and so I will have to wait until next week to keep my promise of more music. But in the meantime, I’ve collected my favorites among the new Ben & Jerry’s flavors suggested on Twitter to coincide with the company’s new policy principles. They are:
- TerrorMisu
- Divestmint
- Mintifada Chocolate Cookie
- Yasser Arafudge
- Palestinian Praline
- Gaza Strip Caramel Ceasefire
- Occu-Apple Pied Cherritory
- From The River to the Sea Salt Caramel
- Chillegal Settlemint
- Over the Green Lime a Part Vanilla & a Part Chocolate Heid
… and perhaps most usefully: Rorshacky Road
