For a moment there, one might have been encouraged by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's aggressive response to US-based ice cream company Ben & Jerry's announcement it plans to halt sales in Judea and Samaria. On Twitter, Bennett wrote: "Ben & Jerry's decided to brand itself as the anti-Israel ice cream." He said: "The boycott does not work and will not work, and we will fight it with full force."
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I'm not so sure the first anti-Israel ice cream in Zionist history will be startled by a few tweets, but Bennett's reprimand of Alan Jope, the CEO of Unilever, which owns Ben & Jerry's, in a telephone call Tuesday and Foreign Minister and Prime Minister-designate Yair Lapid's call for the dozens of US states that have passed anti-BDS legislation to enforce those laws just might do the trick.
Ben & Jerry's may or may not walk back the announcement, but that is beside the point. The absurd thing about all of this is that Israel's leaders are looking to pressure and sanction an American corporation that boycotts settlements when members of their own coalition government vocally support a boycott of products from the settlements.
When the Law for Prevention of Damage to the State of Israel Through Boycott was passed in 2011, Meretz party activists began placing stickers reading "Made in a settlement" on products in corner stores as a service to the public. In 2015, Meretz proposed legislation to label products made in settlements, and a year and half ago, Meretz MK Moshe Raz announced the party "supports the boycott of products made in the settlements."
Meretz has consistently supported the labeling and boycott of settlement products on ideological grounds. It would make sense to examine the positions of members of the Ra'am and Labor parties on the issue as well. Meretz has never walked back this support, and why would it? The party has a right to its beliefs. But when it entered the coalition, Meretz brought these views with it. Its ministers may avoid actively promoting a boycott in their current roles, but we shouldn't expect their party to disavow the values and positions it held before joining the government.
In other words, when Lapid and Bennett raise their fists and make threats against "anti-Israel ice cream" and blast the boycott of settlements as the "shameful surrender to antisemitism, to BDS and to all that is wrong with the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish discourse," as Lapid did, they forget to mention a significant player in their own government has declared it support for such a boycott, meaning they themselves have "shamefully capitulated to BDS." In fact, they went even further, granting boycott supporters political legitimacy.
How credible are their forceful calls to action when, within their own government, there are those who support a boycott of the settlements? How can you demand people overseas sanction those who boycott settlements when you yourself have charged such boycott supporters with running two of the most important ministries? How can the public believe Bennett's rage is sincere when these are the very people he redeemed from the fringes of Israeli politics when he brought them into the heart of Israeli statehood?
This issue has exposed the lie behind the Lapid-Bennett "ideology-free" government. The "interesting attempt" at "coexistence" between such oppositional elements out of the assumption they can promote the 80% of issues they agree on and deal with the remaining 20% later.
The idea that the government can focus on undisputed issues while putting ideological differences aside stands in blatant contradiction to the reality of our lives. On an almost daily basis, the government is required to make calls on core issues at the heart of Israeli ideological controversy, whether they pertain to freedom of worship on the Temple Mount or the eviction of Khan al-Ahmar, and at what price? The state's attitude toward antisemitism and Israel criticism, secular-religious relations. These are just some of the core issues Israel has been forced to contend with over the last week alone. It is not just the highly charged and volatile reality that will come back to bite this anti-ideology government in the behind on a daily basis. It will eventually prove difficult to ignore that the government has hardly handled the 20% of issues that are not ideological in nature with particular virtuosity. The coalition has hardly excelled in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, for example.
It will eventually be difficult to ignore that the once favorably viewed attempt to justify this government's formation through "goodwill toward cooperation" is now presented as an ideal and as some sophisticated and innovative political experiment that will resolve once and for all that terrible nuisance known as "disagreement." Real life, however, is not a romantic comedy; it won't help you escape reality. Nor can you engage in politics through escapist terms. You cannot successfully resolve the existential issues facing the State of Israel without forfeiting your worldview. And that, it appears, is exactly what is going on right now.
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