‘I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream’
Lots of screaming in this season of ice cream lust.
First Ben & Jerry’s set events in motion by declaring to inhabitants of Israel’s territories, as they might phrase it on “Seinfeld”, “No ice cream for you!!!!”
Even though, as writer Steve Sheffey explains in his “Chicagoland Pro-Israel Political Update, “the practical result of Ben & Jerry’s decision is that settlers will have to drive five or ten minutes into Israel to buy ice cream.”
The company’s choice to end its contract with its Israeli partner sparked a conflagration that none of us can claim to have ever witnessed. I found myself observing this spectacle as both an American Jew and a witness to a sociological phenomenon.
Like the entire Jewish world, I was enraged because the company that was founded by two Jewish guys from Merrick, N.Y., on Long Island was poking us in the eyes by withholding sales of its brand from the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Putting aside my ethnic and religious ties, I focused on my astonishment at B&J’s July 19 announcement that lifted it from a popular ice cream brand to a worldwide cause-celebre. For the longest time I have hoped that the Jewish community would awake from its stupor and roar back at pro-Arab campaigns to smear Israel.
American Jews have been asleep for years as the Palestinians rejected an offer for an independent state; commenced a half-dozen wars since 2000; held an Israeli soldier captive in Gaza for five years; and in the service of the Palestinian cause activists committed violent acts and low-level crimes in America, harassed thousands of college students and concocted all kinds of lies about Israeli actions.
Yawn. What’s so serious about that?
But denying ice cream to even a tiny segment of the Jewish people? That is going too far.
So it is only natural that the Jewish people howled in self-righteous protest. We followed the course of the “I scream, you scream…” chorus that originated in a song published in 1927.
We have boycotted Ben & Jerry’s with supermarkets joining in, denounced the company as anti-Israel and perhaps anti-Semitic, claimed that B&J’s Israeli plant could close and eliminate jobs for both Israelis and Palestinians and accused B&J of singling out Israel.
Joel Gasman, the Jewish owner of a B&J franchise on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, pledged to donate 10 percent of its profits to “State of Israel educational causes,” according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Governments are considering if B&J or its parent company, London-based Unilever, violated state policies barring companies that participate in the Boycott, Disinvestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged he “will not be eating any more Cherry Garcia for awhile,” and added, “BDS is a movement that will undermine peace in the Mideast. You cannot have peace if you undermine the economic reality and create divisions. I just believe that’s absolutely the wrong approach and Ben and Jerry shouldn’t be doing that.”
And on July 26, the Israeli-American Council announced that it flew a banner over B&J’s factory in South Burlington, Vt., reading, “Serve Ice Cream, Not Hate.”
“Ben & Jerry’s decision to stop selling its ice cream to certain Israeli populations,” IAC wrote in a statement, “is a disgraceful surrender to the BDS hate movement, which promotes a culture of fear and violence and seeks to eliminate the Jewish homeland. We urge Unilever to discard this shameful decision, end this boycott and invest instead in peace and prosperity through dialogue.”
Wow! Forget rallies against anti-Semitism in Washington. The Jewish people have launched a juggernaut against anti-Semites and Israel-bashers that could prove unstoppable.
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who founded B&J’s in 1978 and gave up operational control in 2000, wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “we’re proud of its action and believe it is on the right side of history.”
Below the bizarre headline “Men of Ice Cream, Men of Principle,” Ben and Jerry wrote, “The company’s stated decision to more fully align its operations with its values is not a rejection of Israel. It is a rejection of Israeli policy, which perpetuates an illegal occupation that is a barrier to peace and violates the basic human rights of the Palestinian people who live under the occupation.”
Ben and Jerry erected their own “barrier to peace” by denying ice cream to their fellow Jews, and now their fellow Jews will give them no peace. B&J awakened a sleeping tiger and in so doing performed a critical service for the Jewish people. Maybe they will scream as loudly for far graver Jewish issues as they scream for ice cream.
Republished from San Diego Jewish World