On Monday, Ben & Jerry’s appealed to its parent company, Unilever, in New York federal court for the first hearing in its bid to prevent the multinational company from allowing its ice cream to be sold in Israel’s West Bank settlements.
Ben & Jerry’s sued Unilever after the consumer goods company announced it was selling the Israeli brand to local licensee Avi Singer.
The announcement comes nearly a year after Ben & Jerry’s said it would stop selling ice cream in West Bank Jewish communities because it was “inconsistent” with its values.
A month later, Arizona became the first state to cut all public funding of more than $140 million from Ben & Jerry’s and Unilever in a move it described as “anti-Semitic”, and within minutes, other states did the same.
Michael Ashner, an investor who has been very active in the fight against the boycott of Ben & Jerry, told reporters. Haaretz Ben & Jerry’s daily refusal to sell ice cream in parts of Israel is an “existential threat”.
View of the entrance to an ice cream shop at Ben & Jerry’s factory in Be’er Tuvia, in southern Israel, on July 21, 2021. (EMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP, Getty Images)
“[We] “I saw it as an existential threat to Israel,” he said. “If a multinational company has to sell its assets to the State of Israel, it is the start of a slippery slope. We cannot allow this to continue.”
Unilever abandoned the boycott and announced the sale of Zinger. Ben & Jerry’s, as its subsidiary, has almost never been able to take legal action against Unilever, according to cited legal sources. Wall Street Magazine.
In response, Unilever refused to pay salaries to independent members of Ben & Jerry’s board of directors. According to council members, this move was a “pressure tactic” to close the case.
The British company that bought Ben & Jerry’s for $326 million in 2000 says it can decide where to sell the ice cream, but Cherry Garcia’s makers say selling the local Israeli business to Zinger violates the terms of the purchase agreement.
In Unilever’s quarterly earnings report last month, CEO Alan Jope criticized Ben & Jerry’s: “Ben & Jerry’s has a lot to do in its social justice mission without getting into geopolitics.”
Ben & Jerry’s on the far left thought they could play their war with Israel without any consequences. They made the wrong bet. https://t.co/1vGltwSROe
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) November 1, 2021
The social justice activists at the head of the ice cream giant have a long history of using the brand in their political activism, releasing new flavors for a variety of reasons including climate change, gay marriage, Occupy Wall Street and the Black Lives issue.
In an interview last year, Ice Cream co-founders and former hippies Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were asked why the decision to boycott the state for their policies did not reach Georgia and Texas, despite their overt opposition to abortion and voting rights in those states. . laws.
“Why do you still sell ice cream in Georgia? Texas?,” McCammond asked.
Cohen, a supporter of Bernie Sanders, shrugged, clearly surprised. “I don’t know,” he said with a laugh.
“That’s a really good question, and I think I need to sit down and think a bit.”
Source: Breitbart
