06/04/2024
VICTORY! After years of pressure from the BDS movement and Palestine solidarity groups, General Mills announced that it divested from its venture in an illegal Israeli settlement in occupied Palestine!
Since 2020, we have all been encouraging people to until General Mills ends its business with Israel. As the success of this campaign shows, boycotts work! Public pressure works!
Along with the BDS National Committee, we “welcome General Mills’ decision as a decisive step towards ending the company’s complicity in Israeli apartheid and violations of Palestinian human rights.”
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From 2002 to 2022, General Mills manufactured Pillsbury products in Atarot, an industrial settlement in occupied Jerusalem, on land stolen from Palestinians in 1970. The factory got repeated grants from the Israeli government to hire Jewish settlers and relocate them to the area, thereby growing the settlement and economically enabling Israel’s continued land theft and occupation.
Meanwhile, the Atarot industrial settlement — and the Pillsbury factory specifically — have devastated Palestinians. The settlement ravaged and suppressed pre-existing Palestinian agriculture and small business, surrounded their homes with trash from international factories, and polluted their air with toxic byproducts of manufacturing. Palestinians who live nearby the Pillsbury factory reported respiratory issues from flour inhalation and complained that “when they pour the flour [in outdoor mixers], the flour… overflow[s] into the house.”
Even members of the Pillsbury family, like Charlie Pillsbury, came to support the Palestinian-led campaign to , saying they "could not support the products bearing their name when its parent company is benefiting from Israel's war crimes." In an interview, Charlie Pillsbury said Israel is a “settler-colonial state” that is “doing to the Palestinians what we as Americans did to… our Indigenous brothers and sisters.” The issue is “about Zionism, not about Judaism. Zionism is a political ideology. Judaism is a faith.”
