Ben, Jerry & the Wrong Side of History

‘Imagine Whirled Peace,” a John Lennon tribute flavor, is as close as Ben & Jerry’s gets to promoting actual world peace — and the founders’ claim that halting business in the West Bank puts the company on the “right side of history” is beyond bunk.

Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield wrote a New York Times op-ed in defense of the company’s move to ban sales in what it called “the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” on top of stating earlier that it was “brave.”

Mayor de Blasio actually got it right: “You cannot have peace if you undermine the economic reality and create division.”

Building a functional Palestinian state requires building a functional Palestinian economy, which means boosting commerce of all kinds on the West Bank — even when the customers are Jews, it means jobs for Palestinians.

All the boycotting and divestment simply leaves Palestinians more distraught — and more prone to buy the hate-propaganda of their anti-democratic, anti-liberal rulers, who pretend that Israel can somehow be eliminated or at least turned into a majority Arab state. Neither of which is going to happen. In fact, the future is in the Abraham Accords — the Arab-Israel peace agreements aiming at mutual prosperity, which were reached only after Team Trump gave the hand to the goons who control the West Bank.

The “right side of history” is truly accepting Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, negotiating a settlement on that basis and giving up on pseudo-legal claims that ignore the multiple failed Arab wars to destroy the country.

Yes, it’s fine to disagree with Israel’s policies, but Ben & Jerry’s move is fundamentally rooted in left-wing thinking that pretends Israel is a foreign presence in the region — denying not just the right side of history, but the last 4,000 years of it.