Ben & Jerry’s and Settler Sue Each Other over Boycott (Spoof News)
Dateline — Israel, West Bank, Occupied Territories, the Promised Land or Land of Apartheid, depending on your political view.
Ben & Jerry’s and an American-Israeli “settler” are suing each other following the Vermont-based ice cream company’s announcement it will not sell its products in the so-called Jewish “settlements.”
The company is suing Besky Robbin, a settler but not to be confused with the settlers of the American Wild West who took over land from Indians after massacring tribes. She bought her New York Super Fudge Chunk ice cream while visiting Tel Aviv, well within Israel’s pre-1967 borders.
Ben & Jerry’s spokesperson Dono Kloom explained, “It is true she purchased her ice cream in Tel Aviv, which we recognize as part of Israel even if the Palestinian Authority’s official flag illustrates the entire country as ‘Palestine.’
“However,” he added, “Robbin lives in the illegal Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo,” which is on land that was empty but occupied by Jordan before its soldiers fled in the Six-Day War in 1967.
Kloom stated, “Company policy is to keep our ice cream out of the mouths of illegal and illegitimate people who we consider obstacles to peace and the two-state solution,” which the Arab world rejected in 1947 before trying to once again eliminate the Jewish state in the name of peace.
Robbin retorted that she will sue Ben & Jerry for its “illegitimate” remark that she argued insinuates that she is a bastard.
Ben & Jerry’s has only two factories outside of the United States, one in the Netherlands and one in Israel, located in the industrial town of Beer Tuvia that is less than 30 miles south of Tel Aviv.
It is well within the borders of Israel that were established in 1949 after the Arabs tried to eliminate the new State of Israel in an effort to make the world more peaceful for them. The Arabs lost what Israel calls the War of Independence, which Arabs refer to as the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe.”
Ben & Jerry’s announcement to boycott “settlements” formalizes what it has tried to do for years, with only partial success due to the opposition of the local factory’s CEO Avi Zinger. He sharply criticized the parent company’s boycott, which he said is illegal in Israel.
The company said it will not renew its current agreement with Zinger because he refused to abide by the boycott directive. The agreement ends at the end of 2022.
It was not clear if the Vermont-based ice cream maker will allow the local franchise to sell to Arab stores in the West Bank, where the ice cream could end up in the hands thousands of Jewish settlers often shop there.
Prices generally are lower in those areas due to Arab businessmen paying their workers low wages. That is why so many occupied Arabs work in occupied Israel every day to occupy themselves with higher salaries.
Unilever said that its subsidiary Ben & Jerry’s “will stay in Israel through a different arrangement,” a statement that infuriated the Vermont company’s chief executive Anuradha Mittal. She said that the company had intended to release a statement without mentioning the future of sales in Israel.
Mittal, a woman and born in India, concluded that since Unilever’s statement had pre-empted her company’s freedom to operate the firm according to its own social values, it obviously was sexist and racist. She stated to NBC:
“I am saddened by the deceit of it… I can’t stop thinking that this is what happens when you have a board with all women and people of color who have been pushing to do the right thing.” [She really did say that. I didn’t make it up — TBG.]
Nearly a dozen Kosher stores in the United States reacted to the proposed boycott of settlers by boycotting Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. If kosher supervising agencies join Ben & Jerry’s vision that companies should be activists for a better world, they could remove its kosher approval of Ben & Jerry’s on grounds that it is discriminatory.
Israeli leftists countered that if Ben & Jerry’s continues to sell its ice cream to settlers such as Robbin, they will demand that it produce a flavor called “Apartheid,” with chocolate and vanilla ice cream being in the same container but divided by a candy-colored divider.
Ben & Jerry’s most popular flavor is Cherry Garcia, named after the Grateful Band whose message was peace and love. One of its lyrics, from the song Man of Peace, is:
“He’s a great humanitarian… you know that sometimes Satan comes as a man of peace.”
