Ben & Jerry trip on a query

The shocking new Axios interview with Ben and Jerry, subject of Herb Keinon’s “What an interview with Ben & Jerry reveals” (October 11) made me proud to be a female – interviewer Alexi McCammond was fabulous.

She exposed why Ben and Jerry think that bashing the only Jewish country in the world is an okay thing for them to do.

It’s because “settlements are illegal.”

How fascinating it is to observe the deep psychological roots of the aggressive Euro-Arab settlement illegality rhetoric. In the eyes of the uninformed – like Ben and Jerry, or Hamas – so-called “settlement illegality” always excuses hostility toward Israel, be it boycotts or terrorism, respectively.

In contrast, unbiased legal experts such as Prof. Eugene Rostow, an eminent international law authority and a dean of Yale Law School, emphasized that it is impossible to seriously contend that Israeli settlements are illegal. The government of Israel relies on his erudite approach, which Israel has a legal right to do.

It is thus high time for Jewish Ben and Jerry to either boycott all the countries in the world, as they put it in the Axios interview – or to stop their boycott against one-fifth of Israel. Because their boycott does not have a leg to stand on.

Waiting to hear from you, Ben and Jerry.

SUSIE DYM Spokesperson, Mattot Arim; Rehovot, Israel

Regarding “Ben and Jerry: W, Bank sales halt isn’t Israel boycott” (October 12), the great “Crusaders for Justice” have a problem. They are not leading the fight to right wrongs. They are merely following the dictates of “woke” progressives.

Ben and Jerry are embarrassed because the ice cream bearing their name is still being sold in Texas. Do they know that a large group of Orthodox rabbis issued a statement, saying that the Texas law is in accord with Halacha? The rabbis state that, indeed, the unborn child has a right to life, unless the pregnancy threatens the mother. Then, the mother’s life takes precedence over the child’s potential life.

Ben and Jerry are also embarrassed that the ice cream bearing their name is still being sold in Georgia, which has recently passed legislation that is said to “curtail voting rights.” In fact, the new rules make voting easier and cheating harder, by allowing extended early voting but insisting that voter ID be required.

As regards sales of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream beyond the Green Line, the gentlemen from Vermont need a history lesson. The Arabs of Palestine were denied their first-ever chance at autonomy when Arab states rejected the UN Partition Plan in the 1940s and went to war trying to prevent the emergence of a modern Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland. As a result of Arab aggression, Egypt gained control of Gaza and Transjordan occupied eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria (dubbing those areas “The West Bank” and changing its own name to Jordan). Israel liberated the occupied land in 1967, only after Jordanian troops fired on Israeli-controlled western Jerusalem, as Jordan allied with Egypt and Syria in a war instigated with open genocidal intent.

In its founding charter, issued in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization specifically denied any claim to land then held by Egypt and Jordan. In 1968, Israel offered to withdraw from (some) land liberated in the Six Day War in return for recognition and peace. The offer was rejected by the Arab League. Both Yasser Arafat (2000/2001) and Mahmoud Abbas (2008) rejected Israeli proposals that could have led to the establishment of a Palestinian state on essentially all the disputed land, even with the possibility of joint governance in parts of Jerusalem.

But Ben and Jerry don’t want to deal with Jews who dare to live on land of religious and historic importance to them, land from which many of Jewish families were ethnically cleansed during Jordan’s illegal occupation, land on which the Jews have built businesses that employ both Jews and Palestinians and serve both Jewish and Palestinian consumers. And Ben and Jerry want us to believe that they are champions of freedom and justice?

TOBY F. BLOCK Atlanta, GA

What the interview between Axios and Ben Cohen (Ben & Jerry’s) reveals is that Left-leaning Jews are completely oblivious to their own antisemitism. The fact that they contribute to the antisemitic BLM or that they single out Israel for condemnation is something that has not dawned upon them, which is very strange because this is the precise definition of antisemitism according to the IHRA.

Ben Cohen thinks that he’s protected from the accusation of antisemitism because he’s Jewish. He evidently is not familiar with the role played by Jews in the Communist movement and how they contributed to the demise of Judaism in the Soviet Union. With friends like him, who needs enemies? MATTIAS ROTENBERG

Petah Tikva

When pressed, the only reason that Ben Cohen could come up with for his partial boycott against Israel – that the presence of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria is “illegal by international law” – is false. Unbiased international law experts (of which he is not one) recognize the complexity of this issue: the history of the land, the unique legal circumstances, etc. Ill-informed opinions and actions like Cohen’s only harm the chances for peace, making PA leaders more intransigent.

Cohen may know something about making ice cream, but in this interview, he reveals how embarrassingly little he knows about the Middle East. HELENE WALDMAN

Ma’aleh Adumim

The Ben & Jerry’s boycott of the historical heartland of Israel will not have much negative effect on the residents of communities there, but it certainly has had a negative effect on the stock value of B&J’s parent company Unilever, which plummeted more than 500 points from above 4,350 before the misguided anti-Israel announcement last July to an anemic 3,850 yesterday. Several US states have already divested from the stock and others are likely to do so.

The B&J boycott decision may have been “woke,” but it was neither smart nor moral.

ALICE WEISS Jerusalem