Deadline looms for Florida decision on Ben & Jerry’s Israel settlement boycott
State law demands divestment of pension funds from ice cream company and UK-based parent Unilever
The legal deadline is approaching for Florida to divest from Ben & Jerry’s parent company following the ice cream brand’s decision to stop selling its products in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Under Florida law, the state’s pension fund must divest its about $139 million in investments from the UK-based food group Unilever and its subsidiaries unless Ben & Jerry’s reverses its decision.
Unilever has shown no sign that it will back down.
The debate surrounding the decision highlights the anti-boycott laws concerning the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in at least 35 states.
Florida enacted its anti-boycott legislation in 2018, but the Ben & Jerry’s decision marks the first time that the state will have to divest from a company under this law.
It came close to divesting from Airbnb in 2019 after the company said it would not offer listings in the West Bank.
However, Airbnb reversed its policy shortly before the threemonth deadline for Florida to divest arrived.
Many anti-boycott laws, including that in Florida, apply to Israel proper as well as “Israeli-controlled territories” in the occupied West Bank.
This framing has prompted US politicians such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to accuse the Vermont-based ice cream company of an anti-Israel boycott, while Israel’s UN envoy Gilad Erdan has called the decision “anti-Semitic”.
In an HBO interview this month, the ice cream company’s co-founders, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield – both of whom are Jewish – called the allegations of anti-Semitism absurd and painful.
Although Mr Cohen and Mr Greenfield sold Ben & Jerry’s to Unilever in 2000, the company retained an independent board of directors that has the task of preserving its social values.
Mr Cohen and Mr Greenfield reject the notion that they are participating in the pro-Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel, saying that Ben & Jerry’s has vowed to take steps to continue selling ice cream in Israel.
But it is unclear how Ben & Jerry’s will manage to do so, given that Israeli law prevents companies from selling their products in the country if they refuse to sell in settlements.
“There’s nothing accidental about this,” Lara Friedman, president of the Washington-based Foundation for Middle East Peace, told The National.
“The Israel law and the US laws were designed to corner companies and individuals in the international community into taking a side: there is Israel, river to the sea, and you stand with it or you’re an anti-Semitic, anti-Israel bigot.”
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has joined other pro-Israel groups to lobby for these anti-boycott laws in recent years, has called the Ben & Jerry’s decision “discriminatory”.
Conversely, Jeremy Ben-Ami – the president of AIPAC’s left-leaning rival, J Street – said the Ben & Jerry’s decision “to sell ice cream in Israel but not in the settlements” was a “rational and principled, even pro-Israel, position”.
AIPAC and its allies launched the lobby campaign to pass state-level anti-boycott laws about five years ago, shortly after the EU took steps in 2015 to begin a policy differentiating between products made in Israel and those made in settlements.
The lobby group also pushed a federal-level anti-boycott law, known as the Combating BDS Act, which was designed to give legal cover to the state-level laws, only to have it stall in Congress in 2019 after the American Civil Liberties Union raised free speech concerns.
Some aspects of the state-level anti-boycott laws have not withstood scrutiny in the US court system because of constitutional protections.