A pro-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activist wrote an op-ed in The Guardian explaining how the BDS movement pressured Ben & Jerry’s to cease doing business in the “Occupied Palestinian Territory.”
Mark Hage, a member of Vermonters for Justice in Palestine (VTJP), wrote in the August 5 op-ed that he and other BDS activists had been urging Ben & Jerry’s to stop doing business with Israeli settlements for the past 10 years. VTJP first notified Ben & Jerry’s in 2011 that they had been doing business with the settlements. Their discussions reached a “standstill” in 2013, prompting VTJP to start “a public campaign that urged Ben & Jerry’s to end its complicity with Israel’s settlements. We stressed the obvious: the settlements are a flagrant violation of international law. Selling their products in illegally occupied land, moreover, is in flagrant contradiction to the company’s social mission and proud history of social activism.”
Hage then claimed that Ben & Jerry’s said that the company could run afoul of Israeli law if they were to leave the settlements, prompting VTJP to argue that Ben & Jerry’s should leave Israel altogether. Following the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas, VTJP called for a boycott against Ben & Jerry’s. “The rest is history,” Hage wrote.
He added that while Ben & Jerry’s July 19 announcement said they would stay in Israel, Ben & Jerry’s independent board claims that their parent company, Unilever, did not run that part of the statement by them as part of the agreement between the two. “VTJP will continue to organize until the company’s commitments are honored in full, consistent with the decisions of Ben & Jerry’s independent board,” Hage wrote. “We also implore other companies to break their ties to Israel’s settlements and to its economy as a whole. After all, Israel’s settlements don’t exist in isolation; they are fully backed by Israel, and it is perfectly clear that Israel’s human rights abuses extend beyond its settlements.”
Hage also lambasted the Israeli government for “demanding that our elected officials trample our first amendment rights and coerce a private American company to conduct business in a manner exclusively on terms pleasing to Israel’s government and settlers, no matter what that government or its settlers do to Palestinians. This is as outrageous as it sounds.”
Arsen Ostrovsky, human rights attorney and CEO of The International Legal Forum, tweeted that Hage’s op-ed “just underscores that the @benandjerrys boycott was never about just ‘the settlements’, but a boycott of ALL OF #ISRAEL.” He then tweeted to Unilever CEO Alan Jope that the “ball’s in your court now… What will you do next?”
This just underscores that the @benandjerrys boycott was never about just 'the settlements', but a boycott of ALL OF #ISRAEL.
Ball's in your court now @alanjope @Unilever. What will you do next?https://t.co/OAwEUiqayb
— Arsen Ostrovsky (@Ostrov_A) August 5, 2021
Jope wrote in a July 27 letter to the Anti-Defamation League that Unilever has “welcomed [Ben & Jerry’s] decision to stay in Israel emphatically” and that “Unilever rejects completely and repudiates unequivocally any form of discrimination or intolerance. Anti-Semitism has no place in any society. We have never expressed any support for the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and have no intention of changing that position.”
Various states and localities have announced that they are investigating the use of their anti-BDS laws against Ben & Jerry’s and Unilever.
