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Ice cream that leaves a bad taste in our mouths.

Barry Shaw, Senior Associate for the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, posted here July 27,2021.

Less than 24 hours after receiving the news that Ben & Jerry's announced they would not allow their ice cream to be sold in Judea & Samaria, what they called "occupied Palestinian territory," there has been a grassroots backlash against this company.

 

Both the Israeli TV and social media channels are reporting that Israelis are boycotting B&J's ice cream.

 

The trending emoji in Israel today are photographs of cartons of B&J in trash cans, thrown out by protesting Israelis.

 

You boycott us. We boycott you, is the new Israeli motto.

 

This ice cream company achieved something that Israelis thought impossible following the recent fractious national election. Ben & Jerry succeeded in uniting Benjamin Netanyahu with his political rivals Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid in a coalition against this ice cream brand.

 

Following the announcement that they would remove their products from the territories, Bibi tweeted, "Now we Israelis know which ice cream NOT to buy."

 

Yair Lapid called the decision, "a disgraceful capitulation to anti-Semitism and the BDS movement."

 

Lapid, as Foreign Minister, said he would appeal to the 30+ US states that have anti-boycott laws to retaliate against the company. 

 

Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, said, "the company had made a moral mistake that will turn out to be a business mistake as well."

 

The company founded in 1978 by two Vermont Jews, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, was sold to Unilever, but the influence of the founders is still relevant in the company today. And their influence reflects the woke values that has pervaded many American Jews in recent years, values that have led them away from traditional and legitimate values such as those pursued by mainstream Jews and Israel.

 

Cohen and Greenfield echo the anti-Israel platform of the Vermont for Justice in Palestine which has accused Israel wrongly of "abuses of Palestinian human rights" while studiously ignoring the barbaric Palestinian "Pay to Slay" policy of rewarding Arabs who kill Jews, and the Palestinian authorities who, according to Human Rights Watch, abuse, arrest, torture, and kill Arabs who oppose their corrupt rule, both in Ramallah and in Gaza, while insisting that Israel withdraw from territory that was mutually agreed under the Oslo Accords must remain under Israeli administrative and security control until a permanent peace agreement with the Palestinians. 

 

Cohen and Greenfield are wrong both on their business decision and their biased and mistaken politics. 

 

Ben & Jerry's announced that their political ban would start in another year and a half due to their signed commercial commitments.

 

It is highly likely that, by that time, this company, headed by these two American Jews, will not find Israel a viable place to do business.

 

Israelis like choice, but not one that leaves a nasty taste in their mouths.

 

In Israel today, their ice cream is confined to the trash can.

 
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