A former employee of Ben & Jerry’s said the company’s board consulted with anti-Israel activist and Human Rights Watch’s (HRW) Israel-Palestine director Omar Shakir before the ice-cream maker announced its decision last month to boycott the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem.
“They believed him to be a valid source of information about Israel,” Susannah Levin told Israel’s Channel 2 radio on Tuesday, as reported by The Washington Free Beacon. Levin worked as a freelance graphic designer for Ben & Jerry’s for 21 years before resigning last month after the company said on July 19 that it would stop selling its products in Israeli settlements and eastern Jerusalem.
Shakir penned a report for HRW in April that accused Israel of committing “crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.”
Anti-Zionist activist and writer Peter Beinart recently revealed that he had also “spoken privately to [Ben & Jerry’s] executives and encouraged their efforts” on the boycott decision. Earlier in August, Ben & Jerry’s invited Beinart to speak with franchisees about their concerns regarding the boycott, reported the Beacon.
The British company Unilever now runs the ice-cream company, though founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield have a direct say in social-justice and politically related issues.