A federal court in New York on Monday ruled against Ben & Jerry’s bid to prevent its ice cream from being sold in the West Bank, Reuters reported on Monday.
Ben & Jerry‘s sued Unilever after the consumer goods company announced it was selling the Israeli franchise to local licensee, Avi Zinger.
The announcement came almost a year after Ben & Jerry‘s said it would stop the sale of ice cream in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, for being “inconsistent” with its values.
A month later, Arizona became the first state to divest all public funds — amounting to more than $140 million – from Ben & Jerry‘s and Unilever over what it deemed was an “anti-Semitic” move, and several other states followed suit soon after.
“We believe it is inconsistent with our values for Ben & Jerry’s ice cream to be sold in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” a statement from the company said at the time.
Unilever, which bought Ben & Jerry‘s in 2000 for $326 million, maintains it can decide where the ice cream is sold but the Cherry Garcia makers argue that selling the local Israeli business to Zinger violates the terms of the takeover deal.
In his ruling on Monday, District Judge Andrew Carter did not agree with the Cherry Garcia maker’s case that the sale would harm its brand, saying that the claim that customers would be “confused” by messages on Zinger’s products that ran counter to its own was “too speculative.”
“Ben & Jerry’s has offered no evidence of such confusion or the impact of the alleged confusion,” Carter wrote in his ruling, according to Reuters.
Carter further noted that the West Bank products would use Hebrew and Arabic trademarks, not English language trademarks.
Michael Ashner, an investor who is very active in the fight against the Ben & Jerry’s boycott, told the Haaretz daily that Ben & Jerry‘s refusal to sell ice cream in parts of Israel constituted an “existential threat.”
“[We] saw it was an existential threat to Israel,” he said. “If a multinational corporation can be pressured into divesting assets in the State of Israel, it’s the start of a slippery slope. We could not allow that to proceed.”
Unilever walked back the boycott, and announced the sale to Zinger. As its subsidiary, it is almost unprecedented that Ben & Jerry‘s would react by suing Unilever, according to legal sources quoted in the Wall Street Journal.
Unilever retaliated by denying salaries to Ben & Jerry‘s independent board members – a move, the board members said, was a “pressure tactic” to dismiss the case.
During Unilever’s quarterly earnings call last month, Chief Executive Officer Alan Jope took a swipe at Ben & Jerry’s: “There is plenty for Ben & Jerry’s to get their teeth into in their social justice mission without straying into geopolitics.”
The social justice warriors at the helm of the ice cream giant have a long record of leveraging the brand for their political activism, with the release of new flavors for a range of causes du jour from climate change, same sex marriage, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter.
In an interview last year, ice cream co-founders and former hippies Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were asked why the decision to boycott a state over its policies never stretched to Georgia and Texas, despite their vocal opposition to those states’ abortion and voting rights laws.
“Why do you still sell ice cream in Georgia? Texas?” McCammond asked.
Clearly stumped, Cohen, a Bernie Sanders supporter, shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he said, laughing.
“You ask a really good question and I think I’d have to sit down and think about it for a bit.”