Rusty Brooks
London-based Unilever — whose Ben & Jerry’s subsidiary announced on July 19 it would stop selling ice cream in “Occupied Palestinian Territory,” saying it’s “inconsistent with our values”, creating a gigantic controversy, including boycotts against the Anti-Zionist “woke” ice cream brand, — is now threatening legal action against a group that said it plans to roll out “Judea and Samaria’s Ben & Jerry’s” ice cream to the West Bank, NY Post reported.
The Shurat HaDin Law Center in Tel Aviv applied to distribute Ben & Jerry’s frozen desserts in the West Bank under the name “Judea and Samaria’s Ben & Jerry’s” — arguing that the Vermont-based company forfeited its trademark rights when it said it would be freezing sales in “the Occupied Palestinian Territory.” The agency denied its application on the grounds that there is an “existing registered trademark of Ben and Jerry’s in Israel and therefore it is restrained from registering a new company under that name,”. The Law Center plans to appeal the decision, NY Post explained.
The law center has a battle ahead of them with both the Israeli trademark agency and with the law team of a powerful multinational corporation.
Unilever is a British multinational consumer goods company headquartered in London, England. Unilever products include food, condiments, ice cream, wellbeing vitamins, minerals and supplements, tea, coffee, breakfast cereal, cleaning agents, water and air purifiers, pet food, toothpaste, beauty products, and personal care. Unilever is the largest producer of soap in the world. Unilever’s products are available in around 190 countries.
Unilever owns over 400 brands and is rapidly purchasing more name brands. It is almost impossible to find a home goods consumer product in a store like CVS for example, that is not a Unilever brand.
“Your allegation that Unilever has in any manner abandoned its trademark rights for Ben & Jerry’s is flawed on multiple grounds,” Unilever’s general counsel, Natalia Cavaliere, wrote in an Aug. 12 letter to the legal advocacy group, a copy of which was obtained by The NY Post.
“Ben & Jerry’s intends to continue to distribute and sell its products in all of Israel, except for the small geographic region of the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” the letter added, noting that Unilever considers any use of its trade name a “violation of our intellectual property rights.”
In response, Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center president Nitsana Darshan-Leitner told The NY Post, “We hope to have the opportunity to square off against them in a courtroom,” insisting that her organization intends to “seize their trademarks and utilize their name and manufacture our own ice cream in every Israeli region they have withdrawn from.”
The Pro-Zionist Ben and Jerry’s knock-off has a battle ahead of them in the courtrooms in a Davey vs The Goliath type scenario.
