Dear Editor,
I’m a Jewish U.S. Army veteran. I have been to Israel and the West Bank with other veterans more than once. I have also been to the Jewish quarter in Jerusalem. I have seen and directly experienced the sadistic cruelty and brutality of rabid settlers, backed up by the IDF in the West Bank. I have also witnessed the mostly nonviolent resistance of Palestinians to the strangling oppression of the occupation. It’s about time that Ben and Jerry’s joined the boycott and I commend them for it.
The attempt to squash their right and others to nonviolently protest Israel’s illegal (under international law) occupation – what Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu referred to as an apartheid worse than what they had in South Africa – and your editorial supporting that, is beyond deplorable. It is yet another example of bullying and an attempt to silence and punish legitimate, nonviolent dissent that the Israeli government and its supporters here in the U.S. engage in.
In 2020 the U.N.voted 165-5 to approve a draft resolution in favor of Palestinian self-determination, with Israel and the United States voting against. Is practically the entire world wrong? Or would you say they are all “Israel haters and anti-semites?”
Tarak Kauff