WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: Ben & Jerry’s dissent from parent Unilever’s zinger Zinger deal reflects the mistaken belief of many in the West that historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria are “occupied Palestinian territory.” One commentator says we have a long way to go to get the truth through to the West, but we’ll never get there using the words in her comment.
Ben & Jerry’s Now More Kosher in Israel Than Here
When I was a little kid in a really good public elementary school, the Henry School in the West Mt. Airy section of Philly, in the years just after WWII, a representative of the then Philly-based Breyers ice cream company presented himself in the principal’s office. “We want to show your kids a color movie (a big deal in those days) about how ice cream is made.” He meant, of course, how Breyers ice cream (my kid’s eye view of that color film’s bright luscious strawberry, vanilla and chocolate flavors is still in my head) is made, a ploy Steve Jobs would have approved. When we kids came out after school, there he was on the sidewalk, handing out certificates for a free [Breyers’] ice cream cone at the candy store across the street. It made me a Breyers ice cream fan, little black bean specs in the vanilla and all, for life.
And so last summer, when Ben & Jerry’s, today like Breyers owned by the conglomerate Unilever, declared it wouldn’t renew its Israeli licensee’s license because he refused to stop selling to consumers in the “occupied Palestinian territory” of historic Jerusalem and Judea-Samaria, capped by a Ben & Jerry-sweet NY Times op-ed by Ben and Jerry themselves, patting themselves on the backside as “Men of Ice Cream, Men of Principle” (7/28/21), I wrote to that conglomerate that although I had never liked Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, I’d been a longtime fan of Breyers and that “I’ll miss it.”
Well, it seems, see, e.g., Melanie Phillips’ Friday 7/1 posting, “Licking Ben & Jerry’s” [pun intended], I can now go back to Breyer’s. In a just-made deal of Chunky Monkey business if not of the century, Unilever sold to its Israeli licensee, a fellow named “Zinger” (really), the rights to sell Ben & Jerry’s ice cream all over western Palestine (under its Hebrew and Arabic but not English names). Melanie called this a “neat win-win outcome” for Unilever, now out from under legal and other consequences of last summer’s actions, and for the Jewish and Arab ice cream eaters of western Palestine. And, Cherry Garcia on top, “Unilever said this week that it was proud of its business ventures in Israel, that it ‘rejects completely and repudiates unequivocally any form of discrimination or intolerance’ and that antisemitism had ‘no place in any society.’”
But, alas, another zinger instantly followed. “’We are aware of the Unilever announcement,’ Ben & Jerry’s tweeted on Wednesday. ‘While our parent company has taken this decision, we do not agree with it.’” Ben & Jerry: “’We continue to believe it is inconsistent with Ben & Jerry’s values for our ice cream to be sold in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,’ Ben & Jerry’s tweeted on Wednesday.” NY Post, 6/30/22, “Ben & Jerry’s Slams Unilever’s Ice Cream Sale to Israeli Licensee.”
Melanie Phillips, citing Ben & Jerry’s disagreement with its parent company’s Israeli licensee deal, wrote in her “Licking Ben & Jerry’s” article that we must make a greater effort to get through to the world the falsity of beliefs “that the Palestinians have a just cause, that there is such a thing as ‘Palestinian territory’ and that this territory is occupied.” She put the challenge we’re facing this way:
“…the Palestinian cause is based on a fictional Palestinian identity constructed solely with the aim of exterminating Israel and denying the truth that it is the historic national homeland of the Jewish people.
“These falsehoods are rarely challenged. Many have no idea that they are false because they have never been told the real facts.
“Israel itself chooses not to address these lies upfront. Diaspora Jews are either too timid or too ignorant to do so.”
Ok, let’s address here briefly one of the ways in which Diaspora supporters of our Jewish national homeland of Israel ourselves add to the misunderstanding of publics in the West of our Jewish people’s national homeland case – the phraseology we ourselves and others seeking to be historically accurate uncritically use. Let’s take the two articles, Melanie Phillips’ and the New York Post’s quoted above.
Start with Melanie’s above-quoted lament that Western publics misbelieve
“that the Palestinians have a just cause, that there is such a thing as ‘Palestinian territory’ and that this territory is occupied.”
The place is called “Palestine.” So, really, how implausible is it that “THE Palestinians” have “Palestinian territory” and that if someone other than “THE Palestinians” is ruling that “Palestinian territory,” then that “Palestinian territory” is “occupied”?
How many people in the West know that close to two thousand years ago the Romans, on finally defeating the Jews renamed defeated Judaea as “Palestine,” not in honor of Arafat’s ancestors but in memory of the long-gone Sea People Philistines, for the purpose of disassociating what had been Judaea, and before that Judah and Israel, from Jews? How many know that during the Mandate, it was Palestine’s Jews more than its Arabs who called themselves and their institutions “Palestinian,” including, e.g., “the Palestine Post,” today’s Jerusalem Post? How many know that in its Palestine partition resolution of 1947, the UN General Assembly referred to Palestine’s Jews and its Arabs as “the two Palestinian peoples”? So let’s stop calling Palestinian Arabs “THE Palestinians,” a name that at least equally embraces us.
And now let’s look at that above-quoted article in what sounds more like it belongs in the New York Times than New York Post. Here’s that article’s lede:
“Ben & Jerry’s ice cream blasted parent company Unilever for selling the Vermont-based firm’s operations in Israel to a local licensee – effectively circumventing a boycott of Jewish settlements on the occupied West Bank.”
They aren’t “Jewish settlements,” the place where they are is not “occupied,” and that not “occupied” place is not “the West Bank.” They’re Jewish communities in the Judea-Samaria hill country heartland of the Jewish people’s national home. And Palestinian Arab-majority Jordan, sitting on 78% of the Palestine Mandate, is Palestinian Arabs’ Palestine home.
Israelis and we Diaspora Jews both have to clean up the ludicrous language we use. But now, in addition to the number of nights we respectively have to drink Passover wine, there’s now a second difference between Israelis’ and us: they can now eat [Hebrew-named] Ben & Jerry ice cream without thereby enriching those “Men of Ice Cream, Men of Principle’s” heirs, but we can’t. It’s still Ben & Jerry-owned Ben & Jerry’s to us. But now at least Breyers is honorably back, I suppose with those little black specs still in the vanilla and all.