Ben & Jerry's ... and the West Bank

In 1991, Baltimore Sun writer Ray Jenkins laid out the three options Israel faced in its occupation of the West Bank. Either they:

1. Expel the 1.2 million Palestinians into neighboring countries,
2. Accept them as citizens of Israel, or
3. Institute a pre-1989 South Africa-style apartheid. [Source]

30 years later, the numbers are different (now there are 2.5 million Palestinians), but the choices are the same. And according to two former Israeli ambassadors to South Africa, they’ve gone with #3 – the institution of 165 separate “bantustans” specifically designed to concentrate their “undesireble” population into as little space as possible. [Source]

The issue has implications for U.S. companies who do business in Israel. When Ben & Jerry's announced it will not renew its agreement with its licensee in Israel at the end of 2022 (but would continue operations in Israel “though a different arrangement”)… [Source]

…Israel vowed to “act aggressively” against the decision, and the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. "urged dozens of state governors to punish the company under anti-boycott laws." [Source]

Currently, 35 U.S. states have laws that prohibit government contracts from going to companies that “BDS” Israel – boycott, divest, or sanction. And therein lies the rub – Ben & Jerry’s is not pulling out of Israel. They're halting sales in the West Bank, and the West Bank is not Israel. It's "occupied territory."

In Illinois, New York, and New Jersey, the stipulations go further than the other 32 states, with laws that “ban state agencies from contracting with companies that refuse to do business with Israel or with ‘territories controlled by Israel,’ and prohibit public pension funds from investing in them.”[Source]

But as the president of J Street (a liberal pro-Israel group) Jeremy Ben Ami explained, “critics are wrong to deem Ben & Jerry’s move as a boycott of Israel because the settlements are not a part of Israel, and that calling for economic equality without political equality is an untenable position for the Jewish establishment and pro-Israel organizations to hold.”

Either the West Bank is all part of Israel, in which case everybody who lives in the occupied territory should have equal rights (Option #2), or there’s a distinction, a.k.a. apartheid (Option #3).

As Ben-Ami put it, “You can’t have your ice cream and eat it too.”