Israel’s vicious response to Ben and Jerry– ‘antisemites’– is a wakeup call for American Jews
Palestinian artists paint a mural in Gaza City to honour Ben & Jerry’s decision to boycott Israeli settlements, 29 July 2021
Jonathan Ofir writes in Mondoweiss:
“The antisemites will not win over us. Not even with ice cream.” This was the victorious tweet of Yair Lapid, Israel’s Prime Minister as of tonight, upon publication of the news by Ben & Jerry’s parent company Unilever, that it has decided to sell its production rights of Ben & Jerry’s to the local Israeli producer Avi Zinger, owner of American Quality Products. So Ben& Jerry’s ice cream will continue be produced in Israel and distributed throughout the illegal settlements, merely without the English logo, and instead with a Hebrew and Arabic one. This was the “arrangement” reached by Unilever after Ben & Jerry’s announced last year that they would stop selling their ice cream in Israeli settlements, and an ensuing legal battle involving the highest political echelons.
Yesterday Ben & Jerry’s announced that they disagree with Unilever’s announced decision. Unilever has permitted a kind of knockoff product and bypassed Ben & Jerry’s (which has a an independent board with ostensible autonomy over social responsibility considerations).
Foreign Minister Lapid will now be stepping in as Prime Minister – this is political dealing at the highest levels of government. It is worth pointing out the bitter irony in Lapid’s claim that the Ben & Jerry’s move was led by “antisemites”: That is in itself an antisemitic attack against Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the founders of Ben & Jerry’s– two “proud Jews” as they called themselves in their New York Times opinion article on the matter from last year, in which they expressed the belief that “it’s possible to support Israel and oppose some of its policies”.
This story has to have significance in relation to how one strategizes a boycott against Israel. The moral of the story is, that the “selective boycott”, that is a boycott of Israel’s war crimes– and settlements are war crimes, under international law– will result in the same response as a more inclusive boycott call that takes the whole country to task for its violations, which include crimes against humanity such as Apartheid. Ben & Jerry’s have tried to go the selective way, a way which has been the hallmark of many “liberal Zionists”, but the Israeli response from top down suggests that there is no benefit in such caution. It simply misses the mark. The Israeli government (notably with its supposedly liberal heroes), will treat any boycott, as partial as it may be, as an attack on the whole state, and in fact, as an attack on all Jews, as Lapid’s words indicate.