Ben & Jerry’s is back in the news again, carrying on a long campaign in favor of progressive social issues and a tactic of withholding or withdrawing its ice cream from a market as a form of protest against what founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield see as injustice in the country, province, or territory in question. Last month, in what it meant to be a bold statement against Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories, the company announced that it would cease selling its products in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, though not in Israel as a whole.

One of the last places one would expect to find criticism of Ben & Jerry’s is in the pages of the almost monochromatically liberal New York Times. B ...