World War III increasingly looks like it is going to be really weird.
Israel’s president has been targeted by a barrage of social media snark after he bravely compared Ben & Jerry’s decision, to stop selling its ice cream in the occupied Palestinian territories, to terrorism.
The Vermont-based ice cream brand, which has developed a reputation over the years as a champion of progressive causes, announced earlier this week that it would be “inconsistent” with its values to sell its ice cream in Gaza and the West Bank. The boycott was prompted by “concerns shared with us by our fans and trusted partners,” the left-leaning ice cream maker explained.
The decision sparked both applause and condemnation but, on Wednesday, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog issued a uniquely extreme analysis of the move.
“The boycott of Israel is a new sort of terrorism, economic terrorism,” Herzog said, as quoted by Haaretz. “Terrorism tries to harm the citizens of Israel and the economy of Israel. We must oppose this boycott and terrorism in any form.”
No doubt this will puzzle the historians of the future. It’s already confusing enough to try to understand how the assassination of a minor figure of the Austro-Hungarian nobility by Serbs led to war between the USA and Germany, but can you imagine trying to explain how World War III was started by an IDF attack on a pair of aging hippies in Burlington, Vermont?