General Mills Among 15 Companies to Stop Doing Business in Israeli Settlements: UN Report

 

The United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights has removed General Mills and 14 other business entities from a blacklist of companies identified as working in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

General Mills, which earned $19 billion in 2022 and is the company behind Honey Nut Cheerios and Haagen-Dazs, first announced plans to sell its stake in a factory it managed in partnership with Bodan Holding, an Israeli investment group, in an industrial zone near East Jerusalem last June. The company, however, denied that its decision was motivated by politics.

“We have made clear the global business strategy that drove this decision,” a spokesperson for the company told Jewish Telegraphic Agency at the time. “Any claims by others for taking credit for this decision are false. We continue to sell our product in Israel and look forward to continuing to serve Israeli consumers with our other brands.”

Other companies removed from the UN’s list include Ashstrom Properties, Darban Investments, and Zorganika, a company that grew dates in the West Bank. Over 100 companies, a majority of which are based in Israel, remain on it.

“We found reasonable grounds for the removal of 15 businesses enterprises on the basis that they were ceasing or were no longer involved in one or more of the listed activities in the [Occupied Palestinian Territories],” a statement issued by the High Commissioner’s office on Friday said. “We hope this serves as a tool for constructive engagement to ensure full compliance with obligations and responsibilities under international human rights law.”

First issued in 2020, the blacklist, formally referred to as “the database of business enterprises involved in certain activities relating to settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory,” has been criticized for being indicative of anti-Israel bias in the UN, which has consistently passed measures perceived as undermining the country’s legitimacy.

“The United States has long opposed the creation or release of this database, which was mandated by the discredited UN Human Rights Council in 2016,” former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in Feb. 2020. “Attempts to isolate Israel run counter to all of our efforts to build conditions conducive to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that lead to a comprehensive and enduring peace.”

A statement by the Permanent Mission of Israel to the UN in Geneva called the list “discriminatory” and called on companies “not to submit to these boycott measures, but rather, to join the hundreds of Israeli and international companies who operate in Israel, with full respect for the norms of corporate social responsibility and human rights.”

Israel’s relationship with the UN has become increasingly frosty in recent years.

Earlier this month, the body’s Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry (CoI) issued a report accusing Israel of war crimes and suppression of Palestinian civil society. Israel said in response that CoI’s conclusions proceeded from “kangaroo trials” and noted that one of the group’s commissioners, Miloon Kothari, has publicly uttered antisemitic conspiracies, accusing Jews of controlling social media to promote a pro-Israel narrative.

In December, the UN General Assembly scheduled a controversial vote on a resolution asking the International Court of Justice to issue an advisory opinion on the “occupied” Palestinian territories after after observance of Shabbat began in New York City, which caused the US Mission to the UN to vote on Israel’s behalf by proxy.

After the resolution passed, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan, speaking before the Security Council, accused the body of allowing Palestinian leaders to obstruct the peace process by waging a “jihad war of multilateral terrorism” intended to “destroy the Jewish state.”