Justice is sweet

We like the way Ben & Jerry’s tastes — especially Phish Food (even though we don’t care much for the band). But the ice-cream-brand founders’ politically pointed move to end sales in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which includes the Old City’s Jewish Quarter, was a foul manifestation of the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel, which singles out and seeks to ostracize and delegitimize the planet’s one and only Jewish state.

Individuals and companies are free to turn their backs on countries for reasons good, bad and ugly; the First Amendment bars the government from expressly prohibiting such advocacy. But those who oppose bad boycotts have a concomitant right, indeed in our view a responsibility, to push back by opposing companies that engage in them. That can includes governments refusing to invest taxpayer money in such enterprises, which is what New York did to B&J’s. Live by the boycott, die by it.

When legal pressure ratcheted up on Unilever, the

London-based multinational conglomerate parent of the Vermont-born hippy-dippy frozen treat maker (founded by New York City-born Jews), it ultimately buckled. In a legal settlement this week, Unilever announced that it had sold the Israeli branch of its brand to a local distributor that will return the cartons to East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

This is great news that means the desserts will not only be available to 2.7 million West Bank Palestinians who might like to partake — and why shouldn’t they be able to? — but will be back in freezers in the Jewish Quarter of the city that the U.S. correctly recognizes as the capital of Israel.

Of course, it proved too much for Ben and Jerry to swallow; they tersely proclaimed, “we do not agree.” Let that sink in like a spoon of Cherry Garcia settling in your stomach. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield oppose their faces and namesake appearing in freezers in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem, which includes the Western Wall. That sounds like a new flavor: