Boycott Pillsbury
Last summer Ben & Jerry’s announced that it would stop selling its ice cream in illegal West Bank settlements. Despite the move, the company made it clear that they weren’t ending all their business in Israel and that they didn’t support the BDS movement. Palestine activists continue to pressure Ben & Jerry’s to pull out of the country altogether. Although the future of Ben & Jerry’s in Israel remains unclear, there was something very notable about their statement. They said that they move over human rights concerns. Selling ice cream in the settlements was “inconsistent with our values”, they told consumers.
This is almost never the case. When a company decides to end its business in a settlement, they don’t usually admit that activist pressure inspired the move. So it was no surprise how General Mills announced that it was divesting from its Israeli business last month. Since 2002 the company had manufactured Pillsbury products in a factory located in the Atarot Industrial Zone, land illegally annexed by Israel after the 1967 war. For the last two years the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has led a campaign encouraging people to boycott Pillsbury products until General Mills stops using the factory. This included petitions, protests, shareholder activism, and other actions. The effort even received support from the members of the Pillsbury family, direct descendants of the man who founded the company back in 1869.
The General Mills announcement neglected to mention any of this. “General Mills today announced that it has sold its stake in its joint venture in Israel, which principally markets dough products, to Bodan Holdings, its prior joint venture partner,” it reads. “This divestiture represents another step in General Mills’ Accelerate strategy, which is centered on strategic choices about where to prioritize our resources to drive superior returns. Internationally, the strategy includes efforts to reshape the company’s portfolio for sustainable, profitable growth by increasing its focus on advantaged global platforms, which include Mexican food, super-premium ice cream and snack bars. The divestiture follows our earlier announcement of the proposed sale of our European dough business.” After the AFSC declared victory, General Mills released another statement: “We have made clear the global business strategy that drove this decision. Any claims by others taking credit for this decision are false.” Pro-Israel websites quickly produced posts aimed at proving that BDS remains a big failure.
However, the company’s logic doesn’t really hold up. This week I spoke to AFSC’s Economic Activism Director Dov Baum about General Mills’s decision and she broke down the details. Here’s Baum:
There are two things that people really need to understand. The first and most important one is that companies are not moral subjects. We don’t expect the company to come out with an ethical, moral political announcement. Corporations are not people, they are money making machines. They are made up of people, but they are machines that are designed just to maximize their bottom lines. So in the 15 years of me working on these issues, I’ve seen dozens of companies stepping back for their exposure to the risks of doing business in occupied Palestinian territory. This is a controversy risk. It’s potential legal risk. It’s really a large controversy in a very small market. So it’s a good business decision. I want to just say very clearly, the company is telling us the truth. It is a business decision. I believe that a company such as General Mills cannot afford to continue doing business in an occupied Palestinian territory in an illegal settlement, especially after being highlighted, as it was internationally by the UN, because this is a high controversy issue. It is something that is not going away. And as a company that tries to sell things to people, I’m sure they didn’t want to be associated with this controversy.
Also it’s a very small business for them. That factory is a small factory. In fact, the entire Israeli market is a small market. So it is a very solid and sound business decision they have made and it’s very rare that a company would come out with an ethical statement on these issues. I know two such examples around the settlements, the latest one being Ben and Jerry’s. With the current legal situation and anti-BDS legislation, Ben & Jerry’s can expect a very serious backlash from Zionist organizations and from these new preposterous legal mechanisms that are penalizing all speech on Palestine. So I think General Mills made solid business decision to step away from this market, but at the same time try to avoid this hateful backlash from Zionist sympathizers. So they made a good decision. This is one big point. This is a good business decision indeed.
The second point to note is that they have a very clever messaging strategy. The company has chosen to come out with a statement about restructuring and a sale of the Israeli subsidiary, General Mills Israel, and to highlight the fact that they will continue making business in Israel. They have directed this messaging directly at Zionist media outlets and the Israeli media, they had lengthy conversations with these media outlets. They don’t want to end up on that list of companies who have caved to BDS pressure.
So I understand why they did that, but the messaging they came out with was misleading. For two years, our campaign has asked them to stop sourcing Pillsbury products from that factory, but their original statement didn’t say anything about that factory. So selling off their Israeli subsidiary did not necessarily mean that they would stop sourcing from that factory. We wrote to the company asking for clarification about that and, again, we received no answer. In the last few days, our campaign came out with a victory statement saying, yes, we think the company really, indeed plans to stop sourcing from the factory. We do that on the basis of reading between the lines of their statements and between the lines means that they came out with another statement saying that they would continue selling their other brands in Israel, which to me means they will no longer sell Pillsbury products in Israel.
They also said that they are moving away from the dough business. The factory is a frozen dough production line, so that means they would stop producing in that factory. In one of the news outlets, they were actually asked about the factory and they said, “Well, that is a dough factory. So we will not continue using it.” So I find this all to be very clever maneuvering on their part, but a total victory for our campaign. They’re doing what we’ve asked them to do and I congratulate them for that.
I think it was really important for the company not to come and clearly state that they would no longer make Pillsbury products in this factory because that might be interpreted as stepping away from the settlements. For us it really doesn’t matter how they speak about it as long as they’re doing it.
Baum’s point about Ben & Jerry’s is an important one. Companies don’t want to be targeted by BDS activists, but they also don’t want to be smeared as “antisemites” or face the wrath of pro-Israel lawmakers. As noted earlier, Ben & Jerry’s has repeatedly said they will continue to do business in Israel and that they don’t support the BDS movement. This hasn’t tempered the hysterical reactions to their decision in any capacity. It seems pretty obvious that the Pillsbury boycott was a success, regardless of how people want to frame it.
You can read my entire interview with Baum at the site.
NSO Group
The controversial Israeli spyware firm NSO is in talks to be sold to a United States defense contractor. Haaretz, The Washington Post and The Guardian jointly reported that the Florida-based L3Harris is on the verge of obtaining the company.
The NSO Group was blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Commerce last year over its Pegasus spyware, which has been used by authoritarian governments to spy on activists. A 2021 investigation by the French media nonprofit Forbidden Stories found that the Pegasus technology was used to target over 180 journalists across at least 20 countries. This includes Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who targeted the family of slain Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, before and after his murder.
A report from Frontline Defenders (FLD) revealed that six activists, who are members of the six civil society organizations branded “terrorist organizations” by Israel, were also targeted by Pegasus spyware. Israel has lobbied the Biden administration to remove NSO from the blacklist.
“We know what repression looks like. Smearing human rights defenders and spreading propaganda to delegitimize their work,” said U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights Executive Director Ahmad Abuznaid at the time. “Surveilling activists and journalists who dare to expose the truth. All the while continuing to commit human rights violations on a daily basis. The Israeli regime is a separate-and-unequal apartheid state employing every last authoritarian tactic at its disposal, but we know the truth: that liberation is coming and Palestine will be free.”
Odds & Ends
? In the last newsletter I mentioned that there seemed to be a contradiction between what Secretary of State Blinken was saying about the Shireen Abu Akleh investigation and what State Department spokesman Ned Price was saying. Blinken had said that the administration wanted an “independent” investigation into the killing, which implies a third-party would run it. Price has consistently made it clear that the Biden team is fine with Israel running its own investigation, despite widespread skepticism that it won’t be fair. This week Al Quds’ Said Arikat asked about the mixed messaging. Here’s that exchange:
QUESTION: Okay. I have a couple more on the Palestinian issue. On – the other day, Secretary Blinken said that he would support an independent investigation of the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh. Could you explain to us what is that? What form would that independent investigation take?
MR PRICE: There has been no change in our approach, and we’ve been consistent on this since the earliest hours after learning of the tragic and reprehensible death of Shireen Abu Akleh. We continue to call for a thorough, credible investigation that culminates in accountability.
QUESTION: Okay. But he said the word “independent,” so is that independent as perhaps a third party – not Israel, not the Palestinians, someone else?
MR PRICE: Our approach remains the same. We continue to call for a thorough, credible investigation that culminates in accountability.
? Supposedly progressive pollsters Sean McElwee and David Shor are apparently hosting a fundraiser for the rabidly pro-Israel Ritchie Torres. The New York congressman doesn’t have a primary challenger or even a GOP opponent yet.
?? Speaking of Torres he’s one 35 House members promoting legislation to disband the United Nations Human Rights Council because it had the temerity to investigate Israeli war crimes.
? Reps Barbara Lee (D-CA) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) introduced legislation to cut $100 billion from the annual military budget and spend it on domestic priorities. “More tanks and weapons are of no use to those without housing, food, or health care,” tweeted Lee.
?? From Axios’ Barak Ravid: “The U.S. asked Israel to refrain from any actions in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem that could create tensions ahead of President Biden’s visit next month.” In other words, please try to hit pause on the war crimes for a few weeks. It’s a bad look.
?? I spoke to Massachusetts activists about Ed Markey’s horrible record on Palestine.
?? The New York Times published never-before-released photos of the original detainees at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. The images were classified for over two decades and finally obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. Here’s a description of one:
The photographer said a crew member on the flight placed a U.S. flag in the hand of the blindfolded detainee between takeoff in Turkey and arrival at Guantánamo, and snapped a souvenir photograph. This detainee was duct-taped after he tried to wriggle around and see through his blindfold, the photographer said. The U.S. military provided the blue jackets and orange caps because the cavernous cargo plane, a C-141 that is now obsolete, was cold at high altitudes.
Like Obama, Biden claimed that he would shut down the facility if elected president. He’s actually upgraded it.
? Here’s Florida congressman Byron Donalds celebrating the existence of an illegal West Bank settlement on Twitter: “This morning I had the honor of meeting with Oded Revivi, mayor of Efrat, one of the most significant cities in Judea & Samaria. Mayor Revivi and I discussed the issues his people are facing and the overall Israeli and American relationship. I will always stand with Israel!”
Stay safe out there,
Michael
