On May 31 General Mills announced that it divested its 60% stake in its Israeli subsidiary. For the last two years the company has been targeted by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) over the fact that some of its Pillsbury products are manufactured in an illegal Israeli settlement.
General Mills’s statement doesn’t reference the BDS campaign and claims that the move simply reflects the company’s “strategic choices about where to prioritize our resources to drive superior returns.” Bodan Holdings, an Israel-based company who previously owned the other 40% of the business, will take over the entire operation. As AFSC points out on Twitter, it remains unclear whether Pillsbury products can still be made in the factory under General Mills’s license agreement.
“General Mills’ divestment shows that public pressure works even on the largest of corporations,” said AFSC’s Noam Perry in a statement. “With this move, General Mills is joining many other American and European companies that have divested from Israel’s illegal occupation, including Microsoft and Unilever just in the last couple of years. We call on all companies to divest from Israel’s illegal and brutal occupation of Palestine, and from the apartheid system it is part of. We congratulate General Mills on this decision and hope this is the first step in cutting all its ties to Israeli apartheid and toward respecting universal human rights.”
Since 2002, General Mills has run a Pillsbury products factory in the Atarot Industrial Zone, a settlement that Israel illegally annexed during the 1967 war. A 2019 report on the settlement, put out by Al-Haq, documents how the factory impacts Palestinians still living in the area. “When they pour the flour [into the mixers which are outdoors], the flour comes into our house. Sometimes the bags of flour overflow into the house,” explained one resident. In 2020 the United Nations identified General Mills as one of the 112 companies that are violating international law by operating in the occupied territories.
AFSC’s No Dough For the Occupation was backed by human rights organizations like American Muslims for Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as the Ainsworth United Church of Christ in Portland, Oregon. It was also endorsed by five members of the Pillsbury family, who published a Star Tribune op-ed in April 2021 calling for a boycott. “We take pride in seeing our family name associated with products sold around the world,” it reads. “But in these times we no longer can in good conscience buy products bearing our name.”
“As long as General Mills continues to profit from the dispossession and suffering of the Palestinian people, we will not buy any Pillsbury products,” it continues. “We call on General Mills to stop doing business on occupied land. And we call on all people of good conscience and all socially responsible organizations across the globe to join in boycotting Pillsbury products until General Mills stops this illegal and immoral practice.”
AFSC celebrated the announcement on social media. “General Mills’ divestment shows that public pressure works even on the largest of corporations,” wrote the group. “We call on all companies to divest from Israel’s illegal and brutal occupation of Palestine, and from the apartheid system it is part of. We congratulate General Mills on this decision and hope this is the first step in cutting all its ties to Israeli apartheid and toward respecting universal human rights.”
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Nonetheless, the State Departments rejected the report, The government spokesman, again Mr. Ned Price, objected to the use of the term “apartheid” when describing Israel. Then, still within the context of discussing the apartheid label, Mr. Price reminded us all that Israel was “the world’s only Jewish state,” & it is important that “the Jewish people not be denied their right of self-determination.” I don’t know if Mr. Price understood that he was interjecting “Jewish self-determination” into a discussion of a report that definitively demonstrated that Israel was maintaining and growing the “Zionist Jewish state” through apartheid practices…when it comes to Israel, self-determination = apartheid.
There is something frustrating, & also offensive, about the State Department’s dancing around the obvious. The implication is that it is acceptable for a state, be it of Jews or any other group, to be racist in practice if that is where their “right” of self-determination takes them. This was the position taken by Adolf Hitler & is now in stark contradiction to international law. But who obeys the law?
Israel is just the most obvious example of the erosion of international law & such agreements as the Fourth Geneva Convention. In the proxy & civil wars that go on more or less constantly, international law, the 4th Geneva convention & the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are simply ignored. It is not just minor powers that are guilty: the rules aren’t observed by the Russians in Ukraine, as they weren’t observed by the United States in Vietnam.
That being said, Israel has certainly led the way backwards, & ironically so. For much of post-World War II’s rules were put in place in response to crimes committed against the Jews. e.g., genocide was made a crime against humanity, & here the motivation comes from the Nazis’ attempt to eradicate the Jews, among others. When Hitler began this project, there were no rules regulating sovereign behavior, be it in domestic or foreign affairs. Sovereignty reigned supreme. The League of Nations had floundered, and its Mandate System established after World War I really masked colonial expansion. From the point of “legal” state action, the Nazis had a clear field for slaughter as long as they restricted their efforts to Germany…”
Lawrence Davidson
ldavidson@wcupa.edu
Blog: http://www.tothepointanalyses.com
You have to wonder about the wisdom of these companies, when they decide to open their establishments in disputed, illegal settlement areas. Surely, they do some research before they make their decisions, and are aware that international laws, and for that matter even US laws, do not recognize these illegal settlements? I guess the apologists who live in the US, play a huge part in “persuading” American companies to operate from there. General Mills like so many other companies, are willing to ignore the plight of the Palestinians to make profits. They seem to be indifferent to Israel’s crimes of land theft, and human rights violations. All they see are plenty of dollar signs. Shame on those who keep operating from there.
“We take pride in seeing our family name associated with products sold around the world,” it reads. “But in these times we no longer can in good conscience buy products bearing our name.”
I’d truly love to believe this. But, in reality, we know it’s about the money. Clearly, Pillsbury’s math shows it’s better business to divest now than suffer the long-term public relations, and associated financial, losses resulting from continuing to do business with the illegal settlements. And that’s very good news for the BDS movement.
As the cute and cuddly, Pillsbury Doughboy might put it, “It’s about the dough, boy!”