TELESUR
The iconic ice cream company, Ben & Jerry’s – which is widely known in the U.S. for its support of progressive causes and its adoration of the rock group the Grateful Dead – won even more praise for its activism when it announced this week their support for the Black Lives Matter movement. But the company’s ties to illegal Israeli settlements has raised a single, unsettling question for many: Do Palestinian Lives Matter?
In an open letter posted on its website, the company explained that Black lives “matter because they are children, brothers, sisters, mothers, and fathers. They matter because the injustices they face steal from all of us — white people and people of color alike. They steal our very humanity.”
The letter explicitly argues that “systemic and institutionalized racism are the defining civil rights and social justice issues of our time.” They close with, “All lives do matter. But all lives will not matter until Black lives matter.”
But while the decades-old frozen confectionery company has supported a multitude of causes – from climate change to marriage equality to challenging voter ID laws that discriminate against Black people – their ties to the Israeli occupation have increasingly raised eyebrows since at least 2011.
Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel (VTJP) have been the most vocal, calling for a global boycott of the company and to protest against their Israeli franchise that sells ice cream and caters solely to Jewish-only settlements in the occupied territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
A campaign begun in 2013 has sought to end this relationship, and also urged the company to issue a statement expressing opposition to the apartheid state’s military occupation and settlement enterprise.
While VTJP has said, “Ben & Jerry’s, to be fair, is not a corporate predator in Palestine in the vein of Motorola, Hewlett Packard, Caterpillar or scores of other companies with ties to Israel’s military and police”, the campaign’s objective is to highlight how simply doing business in Israel normalizes the occupation.
“The simple, unsavory fact is that Ben & Jerry’s in Israel, like many other businesses, benefits directly from a political, legal and economic system of military occupation, colonization, and racial segregation,” activists wrote. “The commercial ties between the company’s franchise in Israel and Jewish-only settlements cannot be reconciled with Ben & Jerry’s widely touted ‘social mission’ or its record of supporting human rights and progressive causes.”
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