An Israeli-Palestinian Ice Cream Sandwich

When you’re Jerry Greenfield, politics follows you everywhere, even into the gym.

About four years ago, the co-founder of the iconic ice cream maker, Ben & Jerry’s, had a chance encounter with Palestinian American activist Wafic Faour at the EDGE Sports & Fitness center in Williston, Vermont.

Faour, a member of the Vermonters for Justice in Palestine, had been pressing the ice cream company for years to boycott Israel. He confronted Greenfield as he was leaving the gym about his company’s ongoing operations in occupied Palestinian lands. Greenfield replied his company’s beef with the Palestinian advocacy group “had been solved,” as Ben & Jerry’s had begun to source some of its ingredients from Palestinians, Faour recalled. “We are now buying Palestinian almonds from Palestinian farmers,” Greenfield assured him.

Faour, who was raised in two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and migrated to the United States as an 18-year-old student, was indignant. The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement aims to end Israel’s violations of international law, he said, not provide a few jobs for Palestinians. “You think by spending money here and there you can solve the Palestinians’ national aspirations?” he recalled asking Greenfield. “Did you ask the farmers what hopes and aspirations they have under the muzzle of a gun?” Greenfield, Faour recalled, “was speechless.