Unilever announced on December 15 that their legal dispute with Ben & Jerry’s Independent Board has been resolved after the ice cream company objected to their parent company’s decision to overrule their Israel boycott.
In June, Unilever vetoed Ben & Jerry’s decision a year earlier to stop selling their product to Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Ben & Jerry’s had argued in a subsequent lawsuit that Unilever violated their merger agreement giving the ice cream company’s Independent Board the freedom to make activist decisions. The ice cream company’s request for an injunction against Unilever was denied by a federal judge in August.
Unilever said in a press release that they are “pleased to announce that the litigation with Ben & Jerry’s Independent Board has been resolved.” They did not provide any further details.
Avi Zinger, who heads American Quality Products and has been distributing Ben & Jerry’s ice cream throughout Israel for more than 30 years, said in a statement: “I am pleased that the litigation between Unilever and the Independent Board of Ben & Jerry’s has been resolved. There is no change to the agreement I made with Unilever earlier in the year. I look forward to continuing to produce and sell the great tasting Ben & Jerry’s ice cream under the Hebrew and Arabic trademarks throughout Israel and the West Bank long into the future.” Zinger had filed a wrongful termination suit against Unilever and Ben & Jerry’s in March, arguing that Ben & Jerry’s boycott was abrupt and that he couldn’t comply with the ice cream company’s demands because doing so would have run afoul of Israeli law and anti-Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) laws in the United States.
