Illinois passes historic anti-BDS bill, as Congress mulls similar moves
By Eugene Kontorovich May 18 at 5:47 PM
The Illinois House just joined the state’s senate in unanimously passing a bill that would prevent the state’s pension fund from investing in companies that boycott Israel. Gov. Bruce Rauner has pledged to sign the historic “anti-BDS” bill.
The significance of the bill cannot be underestimated. European countries have in recent years been whispering dark threats in corporate ears about the “legal and economic risks” of doing business with Israeli companies. The vagueness of these warnings is a testament to their legal groundlessness. But such scare tactics could not help but affect, at the margin, corporate decision-making. Now, the EU will – if it is honest – have to warn businesses of the legal and economic risks of consciously refusing to do business with such Israeli companies.
More generally, the Illinois bill is part of a broad political revulsion over the long-simmering BDS movement (“Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” – the strategy of economic warfare and delegitimization against Israel). While BDS has gotten most of its successes with low-hanging fruit like British academic unions and pop singers, the anti-boycott efforts are getting an enthusiastic reception in real governments, on the state and federal level. And that is because the message of the BDS movement – Israel as a uniquely villainous state – is fundamentally rejected by the vast majority of Americans.
Indeed, a wave of anti-BDS legislation is sweeping the U.S. The most high-profile so far are the bipartisan amendments to congressional bills for Trade Promotion Authority. They establish the “discourage[ing]” of boycotts as one of the U.S.’s many goals in trade negotiations with European countries.
The trade amendments do not take any definite action against boycotters. But they clearly establish that in the eyes of America, the BDS is not like the civil rights protests, as its supporters love to claim, but rather more like the anti-Jewish boycotts so common in Europe in the 20th century, and in the Arab world until this day. Indeed, two state legislatures have in recent weeks passed resolutions saying just that.
