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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Israel Fumes at Ice Cream Company
Ben & Jerry's decision to stop selling in the West Bank exposes the
hypocrisy of Israel's right-wing defenders

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.

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

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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