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December 24th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
In previous years Mondoweiss put out a holiday gift guide full of products we thought our readers would be interested in. There were so many important BDS fights in 2021, that I thought it would be good idea to talk about some products our readers probably won’t be interested in, and highlight that activism in the process.
Puma
Earlier this month Boston-area activists temporarily shut down a Puma outlet with a picket-line protest in front of the store. The BDS movement has been targeting the sportswear company since 2018, when it signed a contract to sponsor the Israel Football Association (IFA). The IFA has multiple Israeli teams based in illegal West Bank settlements.
One of the protesters told me that the community was extremely receptive to action and that multiple people engaged with the activists. One person heading to the store to seek employment even said that he decided against applying once he was made aware of the boycott call.
BDS Boston launched their own local campaign against Puma during the fall of 2020. The group has highlighted the company’s hypocrisy when it comes to social justice. In the wake of the George Floyd protests Puma began embracing the Black Lives Matter movement as part of their branding, but they’re directly connected to Israel’s brutal apartheid system.
“Any profit seeking corporation that is touting issues of racial justice deserves a level of scrutiny,” Lea Kayali, a Palestinian community organizer in Boston, told me this spring. “What’s really clear in this case is that it’s a hollow attempt to rebrand and seem like an ethical company. It’s a trend we’ve seen since last summer. Every company wants to cash in on the BLM brand. As a Palestinian highlighting their complicity is a way to talk about how that branding is very surface level. If they’re planning on sending the cops on peaceful protestors, that puts people of color in our group at risk. We’ve certainly seen terrible things happen over far less. It’s important to highlight the irony in all this.”
The Boston activists are building on a number of international wins. In 2020 Malaysia’s largest university severed its relationship with Puma and last year the Qatar Sports Club decided against renewing its contract with the company. A Puma attorney apparently told a BDS supporter, “You’re making our lives miserable.”
“Profit-driven corporations like PUMA may not respond to arguments about what is right and what is wrong,” reads a report put out by BDS Boston. “But they will always respond to threats to their bottom line. By acting locally in coordination with Palestinians and other people around the world, we can impose a cost on PUMA doing business with the IFA, making this investment an untenable liability and compelling the company to cut these ties with Israeli racism and land theft.”
“Global justice is a local responsibility. Let’s do our part locally to make Israeli apartheid a bad investment globally, for PUMA and for all companies and institutions. Until Palestine is free.”
Duty Free Americas
The Duty Free Americas chain is owned by the Falic family. They donated $5.6 million to settler groups in over the course of a decade, financially support ultra-nationalist, racist Jewish organizations, and gave a bunch of money to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Florida-based company has faced a growing number of local protests and a call to boycott. This organizing has come from the South Florida Coalition for Palestine, a group of social justice organizations. This includes Dream Defenders, Jewish Voice for Peace South Florida, Al-Awda South Florida, Students for Justice in Palestine South Florida, CAIR Florida, and the South Florida Muslim Federation.
“The call for boycott of Duty Free Americas is especially important for us Floridians to answer because the owners of this company are our neighbors — with many of the stores located in this state — and we must hold them responsible and accountable for the millions of dollars they have donated to the ongoing Nakba,” CAIR-Florida’s Central Florida Regional Coordinator Lara Abu Ghannam told me in September. “The South Florida Coalition for Palestine is answering this call by the Palestinian people by hosting a virtual protest on September 12 to kick off the campaign in Florida — we will not be silent in the face of occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing.”
Pillsbury
There will presumably be a lot of Pillsbury products purchased this holiday season, but BDS groups want you to take another route on the crescent rolls.
Since 2002 General Mills has manufactured Pillsbury products has produced Atarot industrial zone, an area that was stolen from Palestine during the 1967 war. In 2020 the United Nations included General Mills on its list of companies connected to Israel’s illegal settlement activity.
Last year Twitter user @gaychelquacker had a great thread breaking down the connection: “Pillsbury opened in Atarot in 2002, just after Israel built its apartheid wall around the whole zone. The wall and its checkpoints, visible from the 160 businesses they encircle, are a constant reminder of how Atarot helps Israel dominate Palestinian lives, livelihood and land. Shortly after its opening and again in 2010 and 2019, Pillsbury got multimillion dollar grants from the Israeli government as an incentive to hire workers. In exchange, Israel got a place to employ Jewish settlers in Atarot and therefore a justification for relocating them to the area.”
A report (PDF) put out by Al-Haq details how the factory creates additional issues for Palestinians still living in that area. “When they pour the flour into the mixers…the flour comes into our house, explained one resident. “Sometimes the bags of flour overflow into the house.”
The campaign to pressure Pillsbury gained major momentum in 2021 after five members of the Pillsbury family joined the boycott. The family no longer owns the company, but their ancestors Charles Alfred Pillsbury and John S. Pillsbury founded the foodstuff producer back in 1869 and obviously still bears their surname.
“We take pride in seeing our family name associated with products sold around the world,” the members explained in a Star Tribune op-ed. “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. We call on General Mills to stop doing business on occupied land.” it continues. “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.”
Ben & Jerry’s
Pro-Israel groups frequently criticize BDS for allegedly being an irrelevant movement that never has much of an impact. But then, how do they explain what happened with Ben & Jerry’s this year?
We have to start with some important disclaimers here. It’s not clear whether Ben & Jerry’s will actually stop selling its ice cream in illegal Israeli settlements, like it announced in July. It hasn’t happened yet. It’s also worth remembering that their parent company, Unilever, has not actually embraced the BDS movement. They say that they will continue to do business in Israel, but that they’re pulling out of what’s referred to as the occupied territories. For years activists have been pushing them to pull out of the country altogether.
Having said all that, it’s difficult to think the announcement wasn’t a momentous one. Ben & Jerry’s pride themselves on being a liberal company and they’ve been folding their preferred progressive causes into their branding since they began selling ice cream. For decades they’ve been promoting things like climate change action and campaign finance reform, but Palestine never entered into that equation.
Vermonters for Justice in Palestine (VTJP) have spent over a decade trying to pressure company and something finally seemed to change after Israel’s brutal attack on Gaza this spring. As the world was gripped by the terrible carnage, the Vermont campaign began getting more and more attention across social media. Here’s what VTJP’s Wafic Faour told me:
Sometimes when you talk to people about this issue they think it’s just something that’s happening far away. They don’t relate to it. So you open the subject and you talk to people about it, about how it’s against international law to benefit from profit from the occupation. It’s been an educational movement because we talk to people about Palestine, Palestinian lives, Palestinian land, Palestinian water, Palestinian environment while we are doing the campaign. We use the company as an education tool.
Even though we did all this work, a lot of people saw this all as a far-fetched goal to get them out of there because we are a small group in Vermont. A lot of us are middle-aged people and we use the old technique of leafleting. However after the May war on Gaza, and so many children being killed, a younger generation seemed to join us. They know technology, Instagram, Twitter. They took it up to another level where it had a real effect.
If this kind of activism isn’t having an impact, like pro-Israel groups insist, then why has their been a robust political effort to punish Unilever over the announcement? Florida, Arizona, New York, New Jersey, and Texas all say they’re divesting their holdings in for the company. Governor Kathy Hochul said Unilever might be added to a blacklist, prohibiting them from any future investment in the state. Twelve attorney generals have sent Unilever a letter demanding that they go back on their declaration.
It remains to be seen whether Ben & Jerry’s stands firm and whether they live up to their promise. Let’s close by revisiting a July article from Palestine activist Marion Kawas, in which she calls for boycotts that go beyond the settlements:
Most Palestinians, and now even leading human rights groups, will tell you that Israel’s apartheid system is the underlying issue and that the military occupation is simply one manifestation of that pernicious system. Furthermore, the response by the Israeli government and its lobby to the Ben & Jerry’s move reinforces that analysis; Israeli officials have dropped the façade of making any distinction between the settlements and the rest of Israel, something Western governments chose to ignore.
A new consensus is forming in the Palestine solidarity movement. Many activists are re-tuning their focus to emphasize Boycott Israel, or more accurately, Boycott Israeli Apartheid, in their actions and messaging. And Palestinians, who have been struggling for over 70 years against this racist colonial oppression, certainly welcome the change.
BEFORE YOU GO – Stories like the one you just read are the result of years of efforts by campaigners and media like us who support them by getting the word out, slowly but doggedly.
That’s no accident. Our work has helped create breakthroughs in how the general public understands the Palestinian freedom struggle.
Mondoweiss plays a key role in helping to shift the narrative around Palestine. Will you give so we can keep telling the stories in 2022 that will be changing the world in 2023, 2025 and 2030?
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