July 21, 2021 @ 12:01am
IT’S not often Palestinians get “sweet” news, but there was one on Monday. Ben & Jerry’s, the American ice cream maker, announced in a statement that it will stop selling its ice cream in Israeli-occupied territories.
“We believe it is inconsistent with our values for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to be sold in the occupied Palestinian territory,” it said in a three-paragraph statement.
Under normal circumstances, the world will applaud such a moral move, but anything to do with Israel is unusual of the most peculiar kind. As expected, the mean machinery of the Zionist regime is already in a savage overdrive mode, with the aim to bringing the eponymous founders to their knees.
Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called the company’s move “anti-semitic” and “morally wrong”. This from a man, who when he was a minister in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, boasted to 972 Magazine, an online publication run by Israeli and Palestinian journalists, thus: “I have killed lots of Arabs — and there’s no problem with that.” Ben and Jerry, being Americans, may not have to worry about Bennett’s bullets, but their business is in his crosshairs.
Bennett’s warning shot has gone off: “The boycott doesn’t work and will not work, and we will fight it with full force.”
Be that as it may, Ben & Jerry’ s is doing the right thing. Besides, the ice cream company isn’t the first commercial enterprise to disassociate itself from the illegal settlements.
On July 5, Al Jazeera reported the divestment of KLP, Norway’s largest pension fund, from 16 companies with links to Israeli settlements in the West Bank, including telecom giant Motorola.
Motorola may be complicit in Israel’s breaches of international law as it supplies software used in border surveillance.
In KLP’s assessment, the 16 companies were contributing to the abuse of human rights in situations of war and conflict through their links to the illegal settlements.
Others, like the 112 companies blacklisted last year by the United Nations for having links to the illegal settlements, must have the moral courage of Ben & Jerry’s.
Ironically, many of the companies are from countries that never cease to pitch the virtues of human rights to the rest of the world: the US, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. These nations should first pitch human rights to the Zionist regime.
Perhaps, it is not easy selling human rights to a nation that has been wrong so long that it thinks it is right. Consider Bennett’s tweet on Tuesday, when the Ben & Jerry’s story hit the newsstands around the world: “The boycott against Israel — a democracy surrounded by islands of terrorism — reflects a total loss of way.” We are not surprised.
To men like Bennett, the Israeli Defence Force is the most moral army in the world. Never mind if the IDF has killed tens of thousands of defenceless Palestinians in its more than half a century of terror.
Bennett should listen to Gideon Levy, a Jew and a longtime columnist of Haaretz, Israel’s English daily. Speaking to the members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Israeli lobby, in Washington, he had this to say about Israel and the US: they are two regimes which have very little to do with democracy.
He has a point. No democracy ignores international law and global institutions, especially in the 21st century. Israel has lost connection with reality. And so has the US.
Source: https://www.nst.com.my/opinion/leaders/2021/07/710161/nst-leader-ice-creams-and-israel