Take one scoop of full-fat sanctimony and one scoop of confectioner’s outrage, drizzle thickly with hippy cynicism, then sprinkle complete nuttiness on top. That’s the recipe for Ben & Jerry’s position on whether Jews should be able to sell and consume their expensive and excessively sweet ice cream in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem.
After a campaign by a group called Vermonters for Justice in Palestine (VTJP), Ben & Jerry’s no longer permits its Israeli franchise holder to sell its products over the Green Line. A victory for the Palestinian struggle? A threat to Israel’s narrow waist? Probably not, though it might help the martyrs of the resistance lose a few pounds.
Haven’t the Palestinians suffered enough? No longer shall the indignities of being a day labourer in the settlements be leavened by a cooling scoop of Cherry Garcia. No longer shall the zealots of the Jewish Quarter recline with a mini-tub of Netflix & Chill’d, a flavour whose name, derived from teenage American slang for dropping round to a friend’s house for casual sex, is as unwholesome as its ingredients.
Why did Unilever, the massive Dutch-American company which owns Ben & Jerry’s, allow itself to be intimidated by VTJP, a group so small that its Central Vermont chapter meets in the Hayes Room of the Kellogg Hubbard Library in Montpelier? Because everyone is scared of being called a racist.
This is the mood of our time, a revolution of resentment. It makes impeccable business sense for corporations to take this hostile impulse and make money from it by pretending to agree with it. But that fans the flames of a hysteria which has little relationship to reality. By all measures, racism has been in decline across Western societies for decades. Except for one kind of racism.
When hundreds of white nationalists rallied in the shadow of Ben & Jerry’s outlet in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017, everyone — politicians, media, and Ben & Jerry too — was outraged, and rightly so. But when hundreds of people rallied in the streets of New York City last week and chanted “Globalise the intifada”, no one said much — apart from the protesters.
Ben & Jerry’s periodically emits press releases about new flavours of “white supremacy”. The anti-Israel mob loves its slogans, too. But what would “globalising the intifada” look like in real life? What, in the context of New York City, or London for that matter, would happen if the chant, “There is only one solution, intifada revolution” were transferred, as the protesters desire, from rhetoric to reality?
We know the answer already. It is written not just on banners but also on police reports. It is visible in the airport-level security procedures at Jewish schools in Europe and, increasingly, the United States. And it’s not as if this is the first time we’ve heard calls for a violent uprising against Jews everywhere in the world, or a single solution to the problem that the Jews, uniquely, seem to be seen as posing to the rest of humanity.
The intifada has been globalised in the names of Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. The symbolism of this boycott matters more than most, because their products, as puns in their left-leaning Boomer titles suggest, are totemic. Ben & Jerry went to Vermont as back-to-the-land hippies. They became monster capitalists but kept on talking the talk: pioneers of what we now call “virtue-signalling”. Bingeing unthinkingly on Ben & Jerry’s became one of the approved activities for the Americans whose religion, now they have no religion, is the signalling of the virtues. Ben & Jerry’s is for upper-middle-class whites.
In 2018, Ben & Jerry’s launched an anti-Donald Trump ice cream, Pecan Resist. I am responding in kind. It gave me great pleasure this week to globalise my boycott of both Ben and Jerry by direct action. As I reached into the freezer cabinet, my right hand hovered over a tub of their Half-Baked. But I did not forget thee, O Jerusalem, so my right hand didn’t lose its cunning. I bought a triple pack of Caramel Magnums instead.
Dominic Green is deputy editor of the Spectator’s world edition
