#1070 7/25/21 – Why This Slight is Different From All Other Slights

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Ice cream maker Ben & Jerry this week brought home to grassroots Israeli and U.S. Jews, to where we can personally react to it, the campaign to delegitimize our Jewish homeland of Israel, or at least the meaningful and defensible heart of it.  We ARE reacting, and that’s a Good Thing.      

Why This Slight is Different From All Other Slights

Ok, so Ben & Jerry’s isn’t the first to mislabel historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria as “Israeli occupied Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem and the West Bank.”  There’s, e.g., at the head of the queue UNSC 2334 by Obama-Kerry on their way out the door, which didn’t exactly drive U.S. Jewish voters into the arms of the GOP.  So why all of a sudden are so many Jews in Israel and America this week screaming over ice cream?  Here’s my reasons why, and why I think our reaction this time is a Good Thing.

It’s a Right-Here-in-Your-Neighborhood-Supermarket Slap in the Face of Us Grassroots Jews: Perhaps, you remember when the U.N. passed its infamous “Zionism is Racism” resolution.  When the vote came up, the great U.S. Representative, Pat Moynihan, turned to Israel’s able Representative, Chaim Herzog, and asked him in diplomatic frustration, “So where are your f—king Jews?”  We weren’t there that day in New York.  Our organizations, which might have mobilized our presence there, didn’t.

But this week we didn’t have to travel anywhere.  We just had to go out to buy everyday sundries or groceries at our own neighborhood pharmacy or supermarket to see the familiar packages of Ben & Jerry high fat high sugar bizarrely named ice cream flavors sitting in their freezers staring us right in the face.  It’s that proximity and direct 1:1 personal product purchasing relationship between us grassroots Jews and Ben & Jerry that drives home to us that this individually involves us, not far-removed-from-us international diplomats.

I read a lot this week about potential legal action and other governmental and organizational attacks on Ben & Jerry’s and possibly Unilever (which apparently doesn’t seem too thrilled with its apparently partially-independent subsidiary’s singling out for not-selling-to Jewish customers in Judea-Samaria and historic Jerusalem).  Well and good, but unlike, e.g., the business-to-business Airbnb thing between that residential stay booking network and residence renters, this Ben & Jerry – supermarket shopper thing directly involves us retail consumers, and it’s in this public marketplace, not just in the courts, that we’re now standing up for ourselves.

It’s a Sneering Flouting of the Vendor-Customer Relationship: And showing us the middle finger along with staring us in the face.  We grassroots Jewish families in Israel and America are the customers here, and for a vendor not just to tell us that our land of Israel’s Judea-Samaria heartland and historic Jerusalem are “occupied Palestinian territories” (none of which, btw, “the Palestinians” have ever ruled ever), but to refuse to sell their ice cream to those of us who live in those intrinsic parts of our homeland, while not refusing to sell it to anyone else, however occupying and oppressive they may be, anywhere on the planet, is what Biden could rightly call “Anti-Semitism on Steroids.”

Enough Is Enough Is Too Much: We’ve had enough, too much, already of the UN, the EU, the Congressional “squad,” fellow Vermonter to B&J Bernie, the media, the BLMs and the Ben & Jerry’s of the world telling us we Jews have no claim to our people’s historic homeland, or at least to the meaningful and defensible heart of it.  Now, if ever, is when If Not Now’s When.

So, now what?  [1] Eat Haagen Das ice cream.  (It’s better and better for you, anyway.)  [2] Make the case that Israel, historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria hill country heartland included, is now and has historically been our Jewish national home, is the land’s next native state after Roman-destroyed Jewish Judaea, recognized as such by the post-Ottoman empire League of Nations’ Palestine Mandate, accepted as remaining in effect by the UN.  [3] Stop saying Jewish homeland-delegitimizing terms – “West Bank … East Jerusalem … Jewish settlers and settlements … occupied territories … Palestinian territories … occupied Palestinian territories … The Palestinians” – all enhancing the credibility of the anti-Jewish propaganda of Ben & Jerry and so many others.  [4]  Add that Palestinian Arabs do have a homeland, 78% of the Palestine Mandate all-Arab Jordan, with its Palestinian Arab majority population, that there exists a Palestine Jew-Arab “two-state solution.”

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Rabbi Barnea in Old Jerusalem on Israelis currently consuming Ben & Jerry’s ice cream:  “The Israeli franchisee Avi Zinger turned down the requirements and said if so he will not renew the license in a year and a half. Therefore here in Israel we buy the locally manufactured ice cream now.more than ever.”   [Now there’s a Mensch and a Zinger – j]