After the ice cream company refused to sell its products in the occupied territories

A spat between Israel and the "Ben & Jerry's" company amid the spy devices scandal

• Ben & Jerry's.

  From the source

• Israel investigates NSO Group's Pegasus spyware.

  From the source

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A week ago, a coalition of media outlets, including the Washington Post, began publishing details of a landmark investigation into spyware hired by the private Israeli cyber security company, NSO Group, and which it used to hack into the smartphones of prominent journalists, dissidents, and activists. Contrasted with the targeted and declared use of the Pegasus spyware, which is only to monitor key terrorists and criminals.

This investigation glimpses the dark world of state-sponsored cyber espionage, explores the growing risks to individuals' privacy and civil liberties in the digital age, and implicitly shines a light on Israel, whose Ministry of Defense has approved the license of NS's Pegasus spyware program. or to foreign governments.

skew debate

But in the days that followed, the debate in the Israeli media about the country’s ambiguous technology exports veered into another controversy over a foreign brand, “Ben & Jerry’s” ice cream. The famous Vermont-based company issued a statement, Last Monday, it said it would no longer sell ice cream in the "occupied Palestinian territories," referring to the West Bank, which is home to hundreds of thousands of settlers.

Ben & Jerry's - founded by two left-leaning American Jews and social justice activists - has a long history of supporting human rights activities, including their support for the Black Lives Matter protests in the US last year.

Its statement said continued sales in the disputed area would be "inconsistent with our values".

token gesture

The gesture was symbolic, and perhaps rooted in long-standing left-wing criticism of Israel's continued military occupation of the West Bank, and the expansion of Jewish settlements in areas where an independent Palestinian state is supposed to be established, under the two-state solution. Ben & Jerry's has also said it will "remain in Israel," regardless of its decision to restrict sales outside the Green Line that demarcates Israel's pre-1967 border, but it continues to elicit a backlash from Israel's political leadership and its close allies in the United States, which have not It shows no signs of regressing a week after that.

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that the company "has decided to classify itself as an anti-Israel ice cream."

President Isaac Herzog said the decision was "a new form of terrorism."

Foreign Minister Yair Lapid called the move a "shameful capitulation to anti-Semitism" and linked the Ben & Jerry's decision to the broader boycott, divestment and sanctions movement aimed at isolating Israel from the world stage.

Dozens of US states have anti-boycott laws that link boycotts of Israel to hate speech, which angers civil liberties groups.

Some Israeli officials and American politicians have suggested that state governments use these regulations to punish the ice cream company.

Ironically, Ben & Jerry's critics ended up calling for a boycott.

And the Israeli Minister of Economy published a videotape of her throwing beads of American ice cream.

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also rode the wave, tweeting that he would avoid Ben & Jerry's in the future.

In the United States, Senator James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) urged his state government to "immediately prohibit the sale" of Ben & Jerry's flavors to Oklahoma.

essential tension

The whole incident reveals a fundamental tension in Israel's position in the Palestinian territories. On the one hand, Israeli officials vehemently reject the accusation that their government perpetuates the crime of apartheid in the West Bank and East Jerusalem - where Palestinians are subject to Israeli security requirements and are denied the same political rights as their neighbors By drawing a dividing line between Israeli policies in the occupied territories and Israel, the Palestinians there are under the control of the Palestinian Authority, a weak and unpopular institution that Israelis claim is responsible for Palestinian grievances.

However, when Ben & Jerry's makes a business decision based on special circumstances outside the Green Line, it is read by every sympathizer with the occupation authorities as a broadly "anti-Israel" move, considered anti-Semitic, and also illustrates the resistance of the Israeli establishment to accountability on the stage. Global.

repeat the same thing

“(Ben & Jerry) has just done the same thing that Israel itself is doing, employing the same argument that Israel is using to fend off accusations of apartheid that there is a distinction between official Israeli territory within the Green Line and disputed Israeli territory,” wrote Michael Koplow, executive director of the Israel Policy Forum. It is outside the boundaries of the Green Line, so treating the area and the people who live on it in different ways makes sense in terms of politics.” It is not true to say that the Green Line must exist when it is appropriate, that it must be erased when it is not, that it is anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, or even a form of terrorism to maintain the same discrimination that Israel itself makes in every way. ».

But this is the context promoted by many pro-Israelis, including NSO Group CEO Shalev Hulio. In an interview with the right-wing daily Israel Hayom last week, Hulio argued that the scrutiny of his company's activities was part of a broader anti-Israel effort orchestrated by foreign conspirators. "In the end, it's always the same entities, I don't want to sound sarcastic now, but there are those who don't want to import ice cream or export technologies," he said.

Speaking to The Washington Post, Hulio said that if the use of NSO technology in the alleged hacking was true, "that's something we won't acknowledge as a company." The Israeli government has announced the appointment of a high-level task force to investigate what happened with the Pegasus spyware, although it is unclear whether the results of this investigation will lead to any real measures. NSO said it does not operate spyware licensed to customers, and has no "full knowledge" of their specific intelligence activities.

Free speech and digital rights activists want to stop the sale and transfer of spyware technology, until a more transparent international system is in place to monitor these exports, and Israel's booming technology sector should be put under certain scrutiny. "Israel is home to the NSO Group, as well as other spyware companies, including Kanderu, which Microsoft accused last week of," analysts David Kaye and Maritje Skak wrote in an opinion piece for The Washington Post. Selling tools to hack Windows programs. The article goes on to say, "It is necessary for Israel to control the spyware sector present on its territory, and to join with democratic countries in confronting the spread of technologies sold in the form of commercial intelligence services."

For some critics of Israel, it is no coincidence that Israeli technology is deployed in countries with illiberal governments.

"If Israel is holding hundreds of Palestinians in administrative detention, without trial at all times, then why should there be any protest if other countries friendly to Israel use a system ( NSO), who grew up in Israel, to criminalize opposition activists until they rot in prison?”

"Israel excels at surveillance, because it watches the Palestinians all day, every day," wrote Century Foundation journalist Dalia Sheindlin.

"Electronic technology pioneers are often graduates of high-tech military surveillance units, and the NSO Group and the Ice Cream District are not strange companions, but rather inseparable," she says.

• Ben & Jerry's, founded by two American Jews, has a long history of supporting human rights activities, including their support for the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States last year.

• For some critics of Israel, it is no coincidence that Israeli technology is deployed in countries with illiberal governments.

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