Dear Letter to the Editor:

For some time the social justice wokes of the Board of Directors of Ben & Jerry’s have been claiming that Israel “illegally occupies” Judea and Samaria notwithstanding that Article 80 of the United Nations Charter, an international treaty that all 193 members are required to obey, declares all of what is Israel including Judea and Samaria to be the reconstituted homeland of the Jewish people — thereby recognizing the Jewish people’s 4000 year indigenous presence on the land. Only Jordan’s actual nineteen year (1948-1967) illegal occupation of Judea and Samaria in violation of the San Remo Agreement (1920), the League of Nations (1922) and the aforementioned Article 80 of the United Nations Charter interrupted the Jewish people’s 4000 year continued presence on the land. When the Jewish people recaptured and liberated Judea and Samaria from Jordan’s illegal occupation in June of 1967, they were able to return to their homes that Jordan had ethnically cleansed them from in 1948.

So not only is Ben & Jerry’s wrong about basic Middle East history, it turns out that Chairperson  Anuradha Mittal and the rest of her toadies on the Board Of Directors are social justice hypocrites. They are the real settler colonialists of this story.

Ben & Jerry’s multimillion dollar factory in Vermont sits on land stolen from the Abenaki Indians who had  been the indigenous people of the land for 12,000 years. The settler colonialists of Ben & Jerry’s are illegally occupying the land of the Abenaki people. In fact in the 1900s the good people of Burlington, Vermont as part of a eugenics campaign forcibly sterilized 3000 Abenaki children. Such a eugenics campaign can be reasonably called genocide.

Yet Ben & Jerry’s sits on land stolen from these indigenous Abenaki people and in the true tradition of antisemitic hypocrites wants to deflect attention to the Jews.

The Jewish people are the indigenous people of all of Israel including Judea and Samaria going back 4000 years just as the Abenaki people are the indigenous people of Burlington, Vermont.

So Ben & Jerry’s is 0 for 2, but they win the hypocrisy sweepstakes.

Richard Sherman
Margate, Florida