Letters to the editor October 13, 2021: Ben & Jerry trip on a query

• Published date: 12 October 2021
• Author: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

The shocking new Axios interview with Ben and Jerry, subject of Herb Keinon's "What an interview with Ben & Jerry reveals" (October 11) made me proud to be a female – interviewer Alexi McCammond was fabulous.

She exposed why Ben and Jerry think that bashing the only Jewish country in the world is an okay thing for them to do.

It's because "settlements are illegal."

How fascinating it is to observe the deep psychological roots of the aggressive Euro-Arab settlement illegality rhetoric. In the eyes of the uninformed – like Ben and Jerry, or Hamas – so-called "settlement illegality" always excuses hostility toward Israel, be it boycotts or terrorism, respectively.

In contrast, unbiased legal experts such as Prof. Eugene Rostow, an eminent international law authority and a dean of Yale Law School, emphasized that it is impossible to seriously contend that Israeli settlements are illegal. The government of Israel relies on his erudite approach, which Israel has a legal right to do.

It is thus high time for Jewish Ben and Jerry to either boycott all the countries in the world, as they put it in the Axios interview – or to stop their boycott against one-fifth of Israel. Because their boycott does not have a leg to stand on.

Waiting to hear from you, Ben and Jerry.

SUSIE DYM

Spokesperson, Mattot Arim; Rehovot, Israel

Regarding "Ben and Jerry: W, Bank sales halt isn't Israel boycott" (October 12), the great "Crusaders for Justice" have a problem. They are not leading the fight to right wrongs. They are merely following the dictates of "woke" progressives.

Ben and Jerry are embarrassed because the ice cream bearing their name is still being sold in Texas. Do they know that a large group of Orthodox rabbis issued a statement, saying that the Texas law is in accord with Halacha? The rabbis state that, indeed, the unborn child has a right to life, unless the pregnancy threatens the mother. Then, the mother's life takes precedence over the child's potential life.

Ben and Jerry are also embarrassed that the ice cream bearing their name is still being sold in Georgia, which has recently passed legislation that is said to "curtail voting rights." In fact, the new rules make voting easier and cheating harder, by allowing extended early voting but insisting that voter ID be required.

As regards sales of Ben & Jerry's ice cream beyond the Green Line, the gentlemen from Vermont need a history lesson. The Arabs of Palestine were denied their first-ever chance at autonomy when Arab states rejected the UN Partition Plan in the 1940s and went to war trying to prevent the emergence of a modern Jewish state in the Jews' ancestral homeland. As a result of Arab aggression, Egypt gained control of Gaza and Transjordan occupied eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria (dubbing those areas "The West Bank" and changing its own name to Jordan). Israel liberated the occupied land in 1967, only after Jordanian troops fired on Israeli-controlled western Jerusalem, as Jordan allied with Egypt and Syria in a war instigated with open genocidal intent.

In its founding charter, issued in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organization specifically denied any claim to land then held by Egypt and Jordan. In 1968, Israel offered to...