The saga of two ice-cream men trying to solve international conflicts has predictably come to a humorous end.
Ben & Jerry’s ice cream will once again be sold in East Jerusalem and the West Bank after the ice cream brand’s parent company, Unilever, settled with its Israeli partner after Ben & Jerry’s tried to sever that relationship. Unilever ran over Ben & Jerry’s “social mission,” declaring that this was the best outcome for the ice cream brand in Israel and saying it was “very proud” of its business in the country, reiterating that it does not support the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement.
It’s an appropriate end to an activist decision that was embarrassing from the beginning. The co-founders of the ice cream brand, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, sat down with Axios to try and defend their decision at the time, but they could not explain why they only stopped selling their ice cream in the “occupied” territories and not all of Israel. They claimed that the move was made because Israel was in violation of international law, yet they decided not to boycott all of Israel in the process.
When Axios’s Alexi McCammond asked why they weren’t extending their boycotts to Texas over its abortion ban or Georgia over its election law, the social justice ice cream duo wondered what the point was. “I don’t know what that would accomplish,” Cohen said, contradicting the logic behind the original stand.
As it turns out, the boycott went as well as their interview. Without being able to try and influence heated geopolitical conflicts, now Ben & Jerry’s is only left with its opinions on defunding the police, climate change, voting laws, campaign finance reform, and socialism. You know, the issues people are really thinking about when they go to the store to buy ice cream.
Too many businesses, athletes, and celebrities think that they must use their platform to talk about politics, even when they don’t understand the issues they are talking about. Ben and Jerry decided to make politics central to the Ben & Jerry’s brand, which makes this failed boycott even more embarrassing.
