05 April 2022; MEMO: Legislation used to crack down on the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign has become the template for efforts to suppress climate change activism, gun control advocacy and other progressive movements, a report by Jewish Currents has revealed.
In their bid to protect the fossil fuel industry, legislators in several American states have introduced bills that are virtually identical to anti-BDS laws. Texas, where anti-BDS laws have been used to force Americans to make a pledge not to boycott Israel before being awarded government contracts, has successfully used such pro-Israel bills to crack down on progressive movements.
According to the Jewish Currents report, in 2016 Jason Isaac, a Republican member of the Texas state legislature, co-authored legislation that banned the state from doing business with companies or individual contractors who withheld their investments or services from the State of Israel. It was later signed into law by Governor Greg Abbott.
Isaac is also an energy policy staffer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Realising that he could apply a similar logic to those who might seek to hobble the energy industry, he drafted legislation preventing state agencies from contracting with companies that boycott or divest from fossil fuels. Drafters of the bill are reported to have said explicitly that the anti-BDS bill was their inspiration.
Several other US states have introduced legislation virtually identical to Isaac's bill, requiring contractors to sign pledges promising not to boycott energy companies. There is also talk of a corporate-funded organisation that drafts model documents for conservative legislators to introduce similar bills across the US.
"Activists seriously concerned with the climate, the environment, and the future of our youth and the planet see divestment as an important strategy, to get corporations on board to do what they can," David Armiak, research director with the Centre for Media and Democracy, is reported as saying. "If governments enact these laws, [then] that could chill those corporations doing divestment. It's going to make activists' job much more difficult."
Palestinian rights advocates have said that the wave of bills targeting climate activism show how attacks on Israel's critics have formed the basis for the suppression of other kinds of progressive activism. They have argued that as long as anti-BDS laws continue to proliferate, other social justice movements will continue to face attacks on their free speech as well.
"They're shrinking the space for public debate and action on some of the most important issues of our time," said Meera Shah, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, which defends the right to free speech of Palestine solidarity activists. "It points to why it's so dangerous to permit this kind of Palestine exception to free speech. Because not only is it harmful to the Palestinian rights movement — it eventually comes to harm other social movements."
These warnings have been issued for years. "As early as 2017, the BDS movement warned that the rising wave of Israeli-induced, anti-Palestinian repression in the US and Europe — which I've called McCarthyism 2.0 — would not stop at suppressing free speech on Palestine," said Omar Barghouti, the co-founder of the Palestinian BDS movement. "If Israel and its fanatic lobbies get away with violating the First Amendment of the US Constitution and silencing advocates of BDS for Palestinian freedom, justice and equality, no other justice movement will be safe."
In nearly every instance where anti-BDS laws have been challenged in court, US federal judges have struck them down. Judge Robert Pittman, a US district court judge in Texas, wrote that the anti-BDS laws threatened to silence unpopular opinions and shape the public debate through force. "This the First Amendment does not allow," he is reported as saying.
