May 19, 2015

Lawmakers of both parties are proving that they will stop at nothing--even blatantly unconstitutional bills--to smear the BDS campaign against Israel, writes Eric Ruder .

PRO-ISRAEL ORGANIZATIONS are pushing for legislation in Illinois and at the federal level to punish institutions and corporations that honor the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) on behalf of the internationally recognized legal rights of Palestinians.

Illinois State Bill 1761, which compels state entities such as pension funds to divest from any company that refuses to do business with Israel, passed the Illinois Senate and House without a single "no" vote in either chamber, and now heads to Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, who has pledged to sign the bill.

Illinois legislators are playing with fire with this legislation. Boycotts are a constitutionally protected form of speech and association--a point carefully argued in another context in this open letter by leading pro-Palestine legal voices. Not only that, but Illinois should not be shielding Israel from boycotts to protest Israeli human rights abuses and settlements, and it should not be punishing companies that have decided to adopt an ethical posture toward Israel.

Activists rally for the boycott divestment sanctions campaign against Israel (Stephanie Law)

At the federal level, Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Illinois) and Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) succeeded in amending fast-track trade legislation pending in congressional committees to add similar punitive measures against boycotts of Israel. According to the American Jewish Committee, which supports the amendments, the revision to the trade promotion authority legislation sought by the Obama administration establishes:

a principal trade negotiating objective of the United States to discourage trading partners from taking actions that could prejudice or discourage commercial activity between the U.S. and Israel, to seek the elimination of state-sponsored foreign boycotts against Israel, and to end compliance with the Arab League Boycott of Israel.

Gloating about the amendment he pushed through the House Ways and Means Committee, Roskam, the co-chair of the House Republican Israel Caucus, released the following statement on his website:

This is nothing short of a historic win for the U.S.-Israel relationship and a hammer blow to the BDS movement--a campaign solely dedicated to the de-legitimization and isolation of our ally Israel. I strongly support free trade negotiations with the EU, but we must also confront the disturbing, rising tide of BDS activity from countries across Europe.

Put another way, Israel's denial of Palestinian rights--including second-class status for its Palestinian citizens, its 48-year illegal military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and its denial of the right of return to Palestinians ethnically cleansed by Israeli colonialism--is safe on Roskam's watch.

Several high-profile pro-Israel advocacy groups--including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Israel Project and the Israel Allies Foundation--are mobilizing support for the amendment, and Michael Oren, Israel's former ambassador to the U.S., also supports it.

Elsewhere, state legislatures in Indiana and Tennessee passed nonbinding resolutions aimed at undermining the BDS movement by describing it as "one of the main vehicles for spreading anti-Semitism and advocating the elimination of the Jewish state," and the pro-Israel lobby is promising to pursue similar anti-BDS legislative efforts in some 15 states in 2016.

PUSHING BACK against Illinois' drive to legislate against Palestinian solidarity in the face of Israeli colonialism is a coalition of organizations, which includes the Center for Constitutional Rights, Council on American-Islamic Relations-Chicago, Jewish Voice for Peace-Chicago, Palestine Solidarity Legal Support, Committee for a Just Peace in Israel and Palestine, Arab-Jewish Partnership for Peace and Justice in the Middle East, Friends of Sabeel: North America, American Friends Service Committee-Chicago, United States Palestinian Community Network, Just Foreign Policy, American Muslims for Palestine, Chicago Area Code Pink and the Muslim American Society Public Affairs and Civic Engagement-Chicago.

Two coalition members--Rev. Donald Wagner and Ghada Hashem Talhami--penned a recent opinion article headlined "Illinois has no business boycotting those who boycott Israel" for the Chicago Sun-Times, which explains what's at stake with the passage of this legislation.

Those of us who call for Israel to respect the human rights of Palestinians are troubled by this vote, which signals that legislators in Illinois are targeting time-honored and constitutionally protected boycott and divestment tactics to achieve human rights for Palestinians. These same tactics propelled the civil rights and anti-apartheid movements in the United States and around the world... Ironically, by pushing this legislation, proponents are forcing a discussion of Israel's abuses and pushing this nonviolent strategy of economic pressure for change into the open... Israel's apologists are in a tough place--how do you stop a multiracial, multi-generational, multi-denominational grassroots movement, composed of students, religious denominations, labor and countless other groups, from pushing for change in the Israeli-Palestinian status quo? This legislation...suggests their current answer is to try to legislate it out of existence and hope no one notices.

In this light, Roskam's claim that his amendment is "a hammer blow to the BDS movement" clearly overstates his own accomplishments. That's because BDS as a movement already goes far beyond U.S. trade policy.

The BDS movement is rooted on campuses across the U.S. and around the world; academic associations and artists have instituted a cultural and academic boycott of Israel; BDS activists have succeeded in denying billions of dollars worth of contracts to corporations complicit with the Israeli occupation; and more.

But even more fundamentally, whatever its economic impact, BDS is raising political pressure on Israel to abide by international law and join the rest of the nations of the world in defining itself as a state of its citizens, rather than as a "Jewish state." This ethno-religious stipulation about the character of the state is what leads to Israel's apartheid treatment of Palestinians in their native land.

Even the main pro-Israel organizations understand the long-term threat to legitimacy. "BDS can change the perception of Israel by creating space for respectable people to have calm debates about the 'merits' of a world without a Jewish state," warned Kenneth Stern, the American Jewish Committee's "director on anti-Semitism and extremism" in 2012.

For its part, the Chicago Tribune editorial board tried to critique both sides in the debate. It condemned BDS supporters for being opposed to a bill that proposes a boycott--as if BDS supporters ought to support all boycotts in principle, even when directed at them.

And it condemned the bill's supporters for unnecessarily escalating the issue, especially at a time when Illinois' pension system is in a dire crisis. "The last thing legislators need to force pension managers to worry about is applying exceptional standards of ethical hygiene to companies that are operating within the bounds of law and U.S. government policy," wrote the Tribune board on May 15.

And that's where the Tribune is wrong. Both the Illinois and federal legislation seek to punish entities that boycott even Israeli enterprises operating in the West Bank. But the federal government itself acknowledges that Israel is an occupier in the West Bank, and that its settlements are illegitimate. Various European countries already restrict trade with Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Thus, these bills aim to smuggle in sweeping changes to U.S. policy toward Israeli settlements in direct opposition to long-established U.S. diplomatic positions.

U.S. bipartisan support for Israeli apartheid is widely documented, and last month, a new and terrifyingly right-wing government was established in Israel. Together, these realities underline the importance of the BDS movement specifically and international solidarity generally in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. There is still a long way to go to compel Israel to end its racist and dehumanizing treatment of Palestine's indigenous population, but as Rev. Donald Wagner and Ghada Hashem Talhami write: