Exclusive | BDS-supporting Zohran Mamdani personally urged Ben & Jerrys co-founder to boycott West Bank: video

Democratic socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani claimed he personally urged the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s to stop selling ice cream in the West Bank — a month before the company announced the anti-Israel boycott, according to a recently resurfaced video.Mamdani, a Queens assemblyman who supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the Jewish state, recalled meeting Ben & Jerry’s co-founder Jerry Greenfield at an unrelated June 2, 2021 press conference.“I told Jerry I was disappointed in the company’s work in Israel,” Mamdani said in the video interview, posted on Facebook at the time by the Muslim Democratic Club of New York.“Ben & Jerry’s sells their ice cream in Israeli settlements.They have partnerships with Israeli supermarkets that have been found by the United Nations to be profiting off the occupation,” Mamdani says in the clip, titled “Teach In: Collective Liberation from Minneapolis to Palestine.”He recalled telling Greenfield that while the ice cream maker had a strong record supporting “social justice in America,” it was “completely silent and frankly complicit about injustice in Palestine.”“I want to see consistency in these values.

I want to see you stop selling in Israeli settlements,” he said he told Greenfield.“Cancel your licensing agreements with all Israeli supermarkets that are profiting from these settlements.Have consistency about justice.”The following month, Ben & Jerry’s announced it would move to stop selling ice cream in Israeli-occupied territories, citing inconsistency with its values — triggering backlash, shareholder divestment and legal disputes with parent company Unilever.Pro-Israel activists said Tuesday that Mamdani’s years-old push for the ice cream boycott was just another example of antisemitism.“It’s further evidence that Mamandi is not just an antisemite — he’s a virulent antisemite,” said former CUNY board of trustee member Jef...