Ben & Jerry’s May Be The First Major Test Of America’s Anti-BDS Laws – The Forward

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Ben & Jerry’s announcement Monday that it will end sales in the occupied West Bank may cause little trouble for its parent company as it tests US laws designed to bar companies boycotting Israel from government contracts and pension funds.

More than thirty countries have passed legislation aimed at deterring boycotts of Israel by penalizing companies that refuse to do business with the Jewish state, and some proponents of those laws now say they should also apply to companies like ice cream maker Ben & Jerry’s that refuse to do so. Dealing with Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

“Selective boycotts are just as illegal as full boycotts,” said Mark Stern, chief legal officer at the American Jewish Committee, which has lobbied for laws aimed at stopping the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement targeting Israel.

“You can’t have ice cream and eat it too,” said J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami.

The company’s decision upset Jewish Twitter, pro-Israel supporters have flooded the company with demands to back it up and several Jewish markets in New York and elsewhere have decided to abandon the product.

But Jeremy Ben-Ami, head of the liberal pro-Israel group J Street, said critics are wrong to view Ben & Jerry’s move as a boycott of Israel because the settlements are not part of Israel, and that this calls for economic equality without political equality. It is the untenable position of the Jewish establishment and pro-Israel organizations.

“Either this is all part of Israel, in which case every person living in the occupied territories should have equal rights, or there will be discrimination,” Ben-Ami said. “You can’t have ice cream and eat it too.”

Ben & Jerry’s will end sales of ice cream in the occupied Palestinian territory. Read our full statement: https://t.co/2mGWYGN4GApic.twitter.com/kFeu7aXOf3 – Ben & Jerry’s (@benandjerrys) Jul 19, 2021

Stern said that many states — including New York, New Jersey and Illinois — go further than most, have laws that prevent state agencies from contracting with companies that refuse to do business with Israel or with “Israel-controlled territories,” and prohibit public pension funds from investing in it.

If these laws were enforced in Ben & Jerry’s case, they could have repercussions far beyond whether or not workers were able to dig into a bowl of Cherry Garcia at state cafes in Albany. Vermont is owned by Unilever, a London-based multinational with $50 billion in revenue from sales of products such as Hellmann’s mayonnaise, Lipton tea and Dove personal care products.

Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, wrote a letter to the 35 state governors who have passed some form of anti-boycott legislation, saying that “swift and decisive action must be taken to counter such discriminatory and antisemitic acts.”

But critics are outraged by the idea that boycotting Jewish settlements in the West Bank, widely considered illegal under international law, is tantamount to participating in the boycott movement, which effectively calls for an end to Israel’s status as a Jewish state.

Ben & Jerry’s announcement that it would not renew its license with an Israeli company that manufactures and distributes its products in the West Bank also stated that it would maintain its presence in Israel “through a different arrangement,” a line apparently introduced by Unilever without consulting Ben & Jerry’s board of directors. independent.

More than 30 states in the United States have passed anti-boycott legislation in recent years. I plan to ask all of them to enforce these laws against Ben & Jerry’s. And the State of Israel will not be treated like this without a response.- יאיר לפיד – Yair Lapid🟠 (yairlapid) July 19, 2021

Mira Shah, a senior lawyer with Palestine Legal, said the details of the laws aimed at suppressing the BDS movement are less important than their goal of cracking down on activity targeting Israel. Palestine Legal, an American non-profit organization, tracks and opposes anti-boycott laws.

“Israel and its allies use anti-boycott laws to discredit the defense of Palestine regardless of the actual provisions, applicability or constitutionality of the laws — or the focus of activity,” Shah wrote in an email. “The pursuit of an ice cream company to support Palestinian rights reveals the desperation of Israel and its allies to avoid accountability for human rights abuses.”

The question of whether businesses – or artists, scientists, and tourists – are able to distinguish between Israel and the territories it controls in the West Bank is at the heart of recent debates about Israel’s status as a democracy. Over the past year, human rights organizations have increasingly sought to treat Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a single entity under the control of the Israeli government, as several groups have filed claims of apartheid because Palestinians in the occupied territories do not hold citizenship. A recent poll showed that 25% of American Jews agree with the statement that “Israel is an apartheid state”.

Supporters of Israel respond by saying that Jews and non-Jews have equal rights in Israel and that the West Bank and Gaza Strip should be viewed as separate territories. But for the purposes of economic activity, these distinctions are blurred.

“We want to see when it comes to the economy that Arabs and Jews, whether they are in the West Bank — Judea and Samaria — or in the whole of Israel, are treated the same way in the economic sphere,” said Michael Dixon, Director of StandWithUs in Israel, who said that more than 10,000 of the Her supporters emailed Ben & Jerry on Tuesday calling for her to reverse her decision.

While Ben & Jerry’s has said it will end sales throughout the West Bank — not just in Jewish settlements — Stern, with the American Jewish Committee, said the problem is that it’s a strategy aimed at blaming one side in the conflict. . While Palestinians in Ramallah may not be able to buy ice cream, Israel will bear the financial price for the decision.

“This is to put economic pressure on Israel,” Stern said. Palestinians are road killers.

There have been a few lawsuits related to anti-BDS laws in states like Arkansas, where the law has been scaled back, and Arizona, where a similar measure has been upheld. The last high-profile case for a US company that decided to end its West Bank operations came in 2018, when travel rental platform Airbnb decided to remove listings in Jewish settlements. The company eventually scrapped the ban but said it would donate proceeds from rents in the West Bank to humanitarian organizations.

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