Israel Declares War on Vermont

Placing extraordinary corporate and geopolitical weight on its signature Chunk ReThunk typeface, Vermont ice creamery Ben & Jerry’s announced via press release on July 19 that the company will end sales of their beloved ice cream flavor “In Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

The company’s discontinued hybrid flavor, in which one kind of ice cream has historically found its way into pints meant for a different type of ice cream, slowly edging out the latter kind throughout the years with the help of the company’s U.S.-based upper management, was pulled because it was “inconsistent with our values.”

One would think this would be enough to finally end all conflict in the Middle East. But now, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has warned the CEO of Unilever that this “blatantly anti-Israel step” will have “serious repercussions, legal and otherwise.” It sounds to me like Vermont is about to get nuked.

Here’s hoping the Ben & Jerry’s team can come up with a new peace-forward flavor that both Israel’s right-wing government and its friends at Biden administration can get behind. We already know the Tonight Dough masterminds are big fans of punning, which is of course beneath me as a journalist, but imagine what they could do with phrases like “occupied strip,” “Bibi Netanyahu,” and “Oslo accords,” or what high-calorie animal-based confection they might try to rhyme with “intifada.”