Ben & Jerry's has a new ice cream flavor in Israel called Milk and Honey, and the flavor is only available in Israel. The new product arrives after the American ice cream company’s 2021 announcement that it would stop selling its products in the Occupied Territories set off a huge uproar in Israel, exposing how quickly corporate branding, state pressure, and settler politics can converge when profit and nationalism are on the same side.
Who Gets the Product, Who Gets the Message
The flavor contains tiny fudge pieces in the shape of Stars of David. The company describes the new flavor as aimed at resonating with local cultural sentiments. In other words, the ice cream is not just ice cream; it is a branded object built to fit a political atmosphere, sold only within Israel, and designed to speak the language of belonging that institutions use to sort people into insiders and outsiders.
The announcement by American ice cream company Ben & Jerry's in 2021 that it would stop selling its products in the Occupied Territories led to a huge uproar in Israel. That uproar shows how even a limited corporate decision can trigger a full-scale reaction from the machinery of power when the interests of settlers and the state are touched. The product line may be sweet, but the politics around it are the usual hard machinery of control.
The Corporate Reset
After Prime Minister Netanyahu defended the need to provide settlers with Cherry Garcia, Ben & Jerry's parent corporation Unilever put an end to the affair by selling the local operation to an Israeli businessman. The sequence is plain enough: a public dispute, a defense of settlers from the top of the state, and then a corporate parent stepping in to settle matters by handing the local business to a new owner. The people affected by the original decision were not the ones making the decisions, and they were not the ones who got to define the terms.
The local operation was sold to an Israeli businessman, ending the affair on corporate terms rather than through any meaningful challenge to the structure that produced the conflict in the first place. The apparatus did what it always does: reorganize ownership, preserve the brand, and keep the market moving.
What the Flavor Reveals
The new flavor is described as aimed at resonating with local cultural sentiments. That phrasing does a lot of work. It turns a commercial product into a vessel for identity management, while the underlying facts remain unchanged: the flavor is only available in Israel, it contains Stars of David-shaped fudge pieces, and it arrives in the fifth year after the 2021 announcement that Ben & Jerry's would stop selling in the Occupied Territories.
The hierarchy here is easy to trace. A multinational company makes a decision. A political uproar follows. Prime Minister Netanyahu weighs in. Unilever intervenes. A local businessman takes over. And the people at the bottom are left with a product whose meaning has been carefully engineered to fit the demands of power, not the needs of ordinary people.
The whole episode reads like a small but tidy lesson in how corporate and state interests manage dissent: not by resolving the underlying conflict, but by repackaging the brand and moving on. The ice cream may be new, but the structure behind it is old, familiar, and fully intact.