In July 2021, Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream announced that it would no longer allow its products to be sold in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
The company insisted this was not a boycott of Israel itself, only of territory beyond the Green Line. That distinction sounded tidy on paper, but it collapsed in practice. Ben & Jerry’s had operated in Israel since 1987 through a single licensed manufacturer, and that licensing arrangement did not permit geographic carve-outs. Either the brand was sold in Israel or it wasn’t. The announcement therefore functioned as a de facto boycott of Israel under the Ben & Jerry’s name, regardless of how carefully the press release was worded.
The response was immediate and consequential. U.S. states with anti-BDS statutes began divesting public pension funds from Unilever, Ben & Jerry’s parent company, even though Unilever itself had not authorized the political decision. Israeli officials condemned the move, and Jewish organizations across the political spectrum criticized it as discriminatory and historically tone-deaf. What had been framed as a moral gesture quickly became a corporate, legal, and financial liability with real costs.
In June 2022, Unilever ended the standoff. It sold the Ben & Jerry’s Israel business and the trademark rights to the existing Israeli licensee, granting that company full authority to manufacture and sell Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream throughout Israel and the West Bank, including the areas Ben & Jerry’s had claimed were off-limits. Ben & Jerry’s corporate board objected and sued Unilever, but the courts sided with the parent company. The episode made one thing unmistakably clear: Unilever, not the activist board, controlled commercial reality.
As a result, the ban no longer exists. Ben & Jerry’s is sold in Israel today, including in the very places that were supposedly barred in 2021. The episode ended not with a principled stand, but with a quiet reversal driven by law, markets, and corporate authority. What remains is not a boycott, but a brief and failed attempt at performative politics that could not survive contact with reality.
The company’s official statement claimed the decision was not a boycott of Israel as a country and not an endorsement of the broader Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. The intention, it said, was merely to end sales in what it called “occupied territories” — while continuing sales within Israel’s internationally recognized borders. The statement wrapped this decision in moral sanctimony, asserting that operating in “an internationally recognized illegal occupation” conflicted with the brand’s “values.”
However, that phrase, “occupied territories,” is not a legal term. It is a slogan propagated by ignorant anti-Israel people and institutions. The legal status of the territory is disputed, unresolved, and explicitly designated as such by binding agreements (e.g., UN Resolution 242, the Oslo Accords). At most, the phrase reflects the assertions of certain international bodies, NGOs, and activists who repeat it until repetition is mistaken for fact.
Thus, the phrase “occupied territories” is not law, not history, and not an honest description of reality. It is a propaganda shorthand: manufactured, repeated, and laundered through the mouths of bureaucrats, journalists, and activists who either do not know better or do not care. No court has ever ruled Judea and Samaria to be “occupied Palestinian land,” because there was no Palestinian sovereign to occupy, and Jordan’s prior presence was itself illegal and barely recognized. From 1949 to 1967, Jordan’s control of the so-called “West Bank” was widely understood, by both the Arab League and the United Nations, as military occupation followed by unlawful annexation.
The term gained traction only after 1967, incubated inside parts of the UN system, hardened through mindless repetition, and eventually weaponized by people who treat slogans as substitutes for thought. It deliberately ignores the intentional ambiguity of UN Resolution 242, erases Jordan’s illegal annexation, misapplies the Geneva Conventions, and retroactively invents a sovereignty that never existed. Calling Judea and Samaria “occupied territories” is not analysis; it is narrative malpractice, a reliable signal that the speaker has outsourced thinking to press releases and activist talking points.
Activists and NGOs love to shout “occupation law” while quietly skipping its threshold requirement: Occupation law applies only when territory is taken from another lawful sovereign (a High Contracting Party). In 1967, there was no “State of Palestine,” and there was no legally recognized Jordanian title. That makes the legal status disputed, not automatically “occupied.” Even serious international lawyers who are hostile to Israel acknowledge this, though usually sotto voce.
Serious law demands precision, context, and humility. Slogans demand none of these. Moral theater is easier than legal literacy, which helps explain why this distinction escaped Ben Cohen and the other liberal “geniuses” in his orbit.
When pressed about selling ice cream in U.S. states whose laws he opposed, Cohen conceded the inconsistency, remarking that “by that reasoning, we should not sell ice cream anywhere.” The comment was widely reported and interpreted, correctly, as an admission that the moral framework being applied to Israel was selective.
Cohen was not brave, prophetic, or informed. He was something far more familiar: the comfortable Western Jew who mistakes contrarianism for courage, ignorance for enlightenment, and public self-abasement for moral depth. From the safety of Vermont and the insulation of immense wealth, Cohen appointed himself a scold of the Jewish state, lecturing Israelis while remaining entirely insulated from the consequences of the positions he espoused.
His rhetorical pattern was predictable. It began with ritual invocation of Jewish identity as a shield against criticism, followed by selective quotation of J', as though outsourcing Jewish ethics to a figure whose name has been used for two millennia to persecute Jews confers moral authority. This is particularly absurd because every moral principle Cohen gestures toward is explicit in the Torah and in classical Jewish teaching, articulated decades earlier than J' by figures, such as the sage Hillel the Elder.
When a Jew cites J' to scold other Jews about sovereignty and self-defense, it is not interfaith dialogue or enlightened ethics; it is historical illiteracy repackaged as virtue and a willful erasure of Judaism’s own moral tradition.
What Cohen fails to grasp is that Israel is not a thought experiment. It is a country confronting real enemies who have repeatedly stated their desire to erase it. Cohen’s flirtation with BDS-style rhetoric rests on the obscene assumption that Israel exists in a vacuum, as though terrorism, incitement, and massacres like October 7th are abstractions, and Jewish self-defense is the original sin. In Cohen’s telling, Palestinians possess no moral agency, jihadist ideology is invisible, and Israeli restraint is endlessly demanded but never reciprocated.
What is unbelievable and remarkably frustrating is that Ben & Jerry’s sells ice cream, directly or via its parent company, Unilever, in countries with records that make Israel look saintly by any serious human-rights metric. These include China (mass detention of Uyghurs, forced labor, total censorship); Saudi Arabia (no free speech, no religious freedom, women historically treated as legal minors, dissidents murdered); Russia (political assassinations, invasion of sovereign neighbors, criminalization of dissent); and Iran (theocratic repression, executions, women beaten or killed for dress violations).
In none of these cases did Ben & Jerry’s suddenly discover a conscience, issue a press release, or declare that their “values” were incompatible with selling ice cream there.
So when Ben & Jerry’s singled out Israel, it wasn’t ethics. It was selective moral theater. If “occupation” or human rights were the real standard, their freezers would be empty across half the globe. The fact that only Israel triggered a boycott tells you everything you need to know about the integrity of the outrage.
Cohen’s sanctimony is enabled by distance: from Hebrew, from Israeli society, from Jewish history as lived experience rather than abstraction. He speaks of “occupation” without grappling with the near-century of Arab rejectionism that preceded 1967. He invokes “human rights” without acknowledging that Israel’s enemies deny Jews any right to exist at all. And he treats Jewish power as inherently suspect, an idea with an ancient and ugly pedigree.
There is something uniquely grating about a billionaire moralist who profits from a brand built on Jewish success while disowning Jewish survival. Cohen’s wealth and platform were made possible in a post-Holocaust world that recognized Jewish sovereignty as a moral necessity. Having cashed that check, he lectures those who live on history’s front lines about their supposed moral failures. It is easy to be righteous when you outsource the consequences.
The tragedy is not that Cohen criticizes Israel. Israelis criticize Israel all the time. The tragedy is that he does so without knowledge, without humility, and without responsibility, while wrapping himself in Jewish identity only when it provides cover. That is not dissent. It is narcissism with the pretense removed: moral vanity masquerading as ethics.
Hence it should not surprise anyone that, in late 2024 and throughout 2025, the Ben & Jerry’s Independent Board proposed a watermelon-flavored treat to symbolize “solidarity with Palestinian refugees” — utilizing the fruit’s colors (red, green, black, and white) which mirror the Palestinian flag. Unilever reportedly vetoed the project, stating it was not the “right time to invest” in such a product, leading to accusations from the founders that the brand’s activist voice was being “muzzled.”
Refusing to let the idea die, Cohen launched the flavor independently in late 2025 under his separate activist label, “Ben’s Best.” Through a crowdsourced campaign, people helped name and design the final product: “Watermelon Sorbet for Peace” (also nicknamed “Freedom Fruit”).
“I’m making a watermelon-flavored ice cream that calls for permanent peace in Palestine,” Cohen said while blending watermelon in a bowl. “Palestinians are still living under occupation, still recovering from years of suffering…”
But you cannot build ethics on ignorance, no matter how tasty it may be.
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