How U.S. Conservatives Use BDS Boycott Laws to Target Other Progressive Causes
The film ‘Boycott’ reveals how anti-BDS laws are increasingly being used as a template to rein in opponents of the gun industry and other conservative issues. ‘It’s a recognition that they’re losing the debate and can't prevent people from seeing reality’ says director Julia Bacha
Bahia Amawi speaking to journalists at a press conference outside of a Texas courthouse as seen in Just Vision’s documentary “Boycott.”Credit: Jonah Candelario
A Jewish dermatologist from North Carolina was invited to speak to a group of medical students at the University of Arkansas earlier this year. After delivering his address, Dr. Steven Feldman went to the state-funded university’s website in order to collect his $500 honorarium – only to find that in order to submit the online form and collect his payment, he needed to check a box stating that he pledged not to boycott the State of Israel.
This peculiar condition stemmed from an Arkansas law stipulating that public entities are not allowed to contract with or invest in companies and individuals that boycott Israel.
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This law is not unique to Arkansas or even, surprisingly, to Republican-leaning states. As of 2023, 35 U.S. states – from Florida to California – have bills on their books that either bar them from investing in companies that boycott Israel or require state contractors to pledge not to boycott Israel.
As online Jewish publication The Forward reported, Feldman was perplexed by the university’s demand. Being a staunch supporter of Palestinian rights and particularly the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel (BDS), he could not agree in good conscience to such a requirement.
Moreover, regardless of his political views, why should his payment be conditioned upon what he decides to do with his own money? He is currently considering suing the state of Arkansas for infringing on his right to free speech.
Anti-BDS laws affect nearly 300 million Americans. Despite this, most of them are “largely unaware” of the existence of such laws, according to Julia Bacha, the director of “Boycott” – a documentary that sets out to explore the topic of anti-boycott laws in the United States.
The film, which premiered at Doc NYC in 2021, and was also screened at SXSW festival the following year, is now available on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming services. It puts the audience in the shoes of three Americans who have been personally affected by anti-BDS laws. The trio – an Arkansas newspaper publisher, a speech pathologist from Texas and a lawyer who represents inmates in Arizona – have decided to sue their states after being denied payments for refusing to pledge not to boycott Israel.
“All manner of people have been forced to sign these anti-boycott certification forms,” Brian Hauss, an ACLU lawyer who represents two of the three plaintiffs, says in the film. “Many of them are reluctant to throw themselves into a major public controversy.” However, he adds, “we got a few brave individuals to come forth and say: ‘This is the right thing to do and I’m gonna do it.’”
“Boycott” traces the origins of anti-BDS laws, and explores how they’ve become a template for anti-boycott laws that target a wide range of social causes. These include reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights and workplace equity.
While these developments understandably worry U.S. progressive activists, Bacha sees the proliferation of anti-boycott bills as a sign of weakness on the part of conservative special interest groups having to contend with a shifting public discourse.
“To me, this really symbolizes an attempt at stopping the conversation from continuing to evolve,” says Bacha.
According to her, the resort to legislative action signals an admission that they have given up trying to convince the public that they’re correct. “It’s a recognition that they’re losing the debate and can no longer prevent people from seeing the reality on the ground. And therefore, they’re going to try to coerce people by threatening their jobs and their livelihoods,” she says. “To me, this really symbolizes an attempt at stopping the conversation from continuing to evolve.”
Over the past 17 years, Brazil-born Bacha has directed numerous documentaries on the subject of Israel-Palestine, with a particular focus on under-documented stories concerning nonviolent Palestinian resistance. She is also the creative director at Just Vision, a nonprofit that seeks to “fill a media gap on Israel-Palestine.”
Unholy alliance
“Boycott” details how the astounding proliferation of state anti-BDS laws rests on a highly effective collaboration between evangelical Christian and pro-Israel interest groups, corporate-funded lobbying organizations and the Israeli government.
Since 2015 (and maybe even earlier), Israeli governments have been involved in pushing for anti-BDS laws in the United States. That year, Israel’s then-consul general to the Midwest, Roey Gilad, attended the official signing of Illinois’ anti-boycott law – the first U.S. state to force public pension funds to, somewhat ironically, divest from companies that boycott or divest from Israel.
However, it was the work of Israel’s Strategic Affairs Ministry, particularly under the leadership of then-Likud lawmaker (and Israel’s current UN representative) Gilad Erdan, which has had the most significant role in advocating for, and funding, efforts to expand the number of states with anti-BDS laws.
Following Erdan’s appointment in 2015, the ministry was known for keeping its methodology secret, going as far as pushing for a bill exempting it from Israel’s freedom of information act. However, starting in 2017, a series of media reports, most notably by Israeli media watchdog The Seventh Eye, revealed some of its tactics.
Apart from paying to place anti-BDS articles in major Israeli newspapers, the ministry was reportedly sending large sums of money to U.S. lobbying groups that promote anti-BDS legislation: groups such the Israel Allies Foundation and Christians United for Israel. The latter’s leader, Pastor John Hagee, is featured prominently in the documentary, fervently sermonizing about a time in which “Jerusalem is no longer trodden down by the gentiles.”
The ministry soon encountered a problem. Foreign Agent Registration Acts laws, which require recipients of donations from foreign governments to declare themselves as foreign agents, led many U.S. organizations to refuse to accept money directly from the Israeli ministry.
Bacha: “If you, as a state lawmaker, are presented with a bill that you are told is pro-Israel, in the current atmosphere of American politics – and I’ve heard this directly from a state legislator – to vote against such a bill is political suicide.”
The way the ministry reportedly circumvented this obstacle was by creating a so-called public-benefit company, tasked with covertly funding organizations that would agree to propagate Israeli propaganda to the U.S. public, without needing to register as foreign agents.
In one particularly striking scene, the ministry’s former director, Ronen Manelis, discussed this strategy during an open Knesset hearing in 2020: “The understanding was that it would be easier for [American groups] to come to terms with a public-benefit company than with an action that the Israeli government is behind. In the end, you see a bank transfer from a nonprofit organization and not a bank transfer from the Israeli government. That’s the idea.”
Originally named Kela Shlomo (“Solomon’s Sling”), before quickly changing its name to Concert, the new company – set up in 2017 – used government as well as private donor money in order to fund Israel advocacy groups in America. Some of these groups in turn lobbied U.S. legislators to introduce anti-boycott legislation in their state, where in many cases they passed with ease.
The reason for this, according to Bacha, is Israel’s unusual longevity as a hot-button issue in U.S. politics: “Even though the conversation [concerning Israel] has moved a lot over the past 20 years or so at the civil society level, on campuses across America, or in the nonprofit environment … at the political level it really hasn’t,” she says.
“If you, as a state lawmaker, are presented with a bill that you are told is pro-Israel, in the current atmosphere of American politics – and I’ve heard this directly from a state legislator – to vote against such a bill is political suicide. So, you just vote for it,” she adds.
Why stop there?
One group that was particularly influential in expanding the reach of anti-BDS legislation was the corporate-backed American Legislative Exchange Council. As the documentary shows, its modus operandi was to draft “model anti-boycott bills,” on which legislators would simply fill in their state’s name and then introduce it at their legislature. It first introduced model bills in 2015, and the format was used heavily starting the following year.
Predictably, the success of these “model bills” in pushing through anti-BDS legislation at the state level seems to have led conservative and corporate lobbyists representing the interests of other industries to jump on the bandwagon.
In 2021, an energy policy staffer at a conservative think tank by the name of Jason Isaac pitched a bill to the Texas House of Representatives that seeks to ban any boycott of the fossil fuel industry. The bill, as Isaac noted in a memo sent to American Legislative Exchange Council members, was “based on anti-BDS legislation supported by ALEC regarding Israel.”
Texas passed a law in 2021 prohibiting companies with state contracts from boycotting the gun industry. Similar bills have since been introduced in the legislatures of at least 13 other states.
After garnering the support of Texas State Rep. Phil King – the lead sponsor of Texas’ anti-BDS bill, as well as former chairman and current member of ALEC’s national board of directors – the bill was passed into law. Not long after, Isaac successfully pitched the bill to members of ALEC’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force, leading to over a dozen U.S. states introducing nearly identical bills that punish the boycott of the fossil fuel industry.
Texas passed a law in 2021 prohibiting companies with state contracts from boycotting the gun industry. Similar bills have since been introduced in the legislatures of at least 13 other states, as well as one federal bill.
Furthermore, at least 10 U.S. states have introduced nearly identical bills seeking to protect companies that fail to provide abortion care, gender-affirming care or fail to meet workplace equity criteria from being boycotted.
The ease with which anti-BDS bills could be altered in order to create new bills that target, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement or environmental activists is illustrated in the film by Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace: “It turns out, you would only need to change about 10 words,” she says. “Why people are not more worried about this is just baffling.”
“Boycott” is available to watch on Prime Video, Google Play, Apple TV+ and Vimeo.
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