Amid rising political pressure based on lies, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has withdrawn her support for bipartisan legislation designed to defang the pernicious international movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel.
Big mistake, senator. Push ahead, Sens. Ben Cardin, Rob Portman, Chuck Schumer and others with this important update of longstanding law.
The BDS movement, as it’s known, seeks to turn Israel into a global pariah, offering the phony excuse of the disputed West Bank. Israel has been willing for a long time to hand over the vast majority of the territory along mutually negotiated borders to full Palestinian rule, as was done with Gaza.
But because Hamas and even a critical mass of supposedly moderate Fatah today cling to the hope that Israel can be eliminated, Israel’s presence there begrudgingly endures.
So offended are a coalition of anti-Israel organizations and nations by Israel’s dogged insistence on defending itself, they want to isolate it — America’s staunchest regional ally, and the Mideast’s one true stable democracy — economically and diplomatically.
The obscene vilification of this small country, the singling out of it and it alone for such treatment, can only be called anti-Semitic.
Still, anti-Semitism is permitted in America. Any individual or group or company can choose, based on their own beliefs, whether or not to buy from any particular nation.
Organize a pro-BDS protest; take out a pro-BDS advertisement; write a pro-BDS Op-Ed.
What is illegal, and has been 1977, is when U.S. corporations essentially conduct their own foreign policy by participating in unauthorized international boycotts organized by foreign countries.
Meaning, if Arab governments, as part of an effort to compile a blacklist of those doing business with Israel, demand U.S. companies report their dealings there, the law would prohibit them from responding. With civil — never criminal — penalties attached.
The law, enforced by the federal Office of Antiboycott Compliance, has been reauthorized several times. It has withstood challenges in the courts. It is wholly constitutional.
The long-overdue tweak would simply clarify that it is not only the Arab League boycott of Israel that can trigger such penalties, but boycotts organized by the United Nations and other multinational groups.
With the UN on the BDS warpath, it couldn’t come at a better time.
Opponents, led by the ACLU, ridiculously claim that the legislation criminalizes free speech. This is false; if it did, how would the BDS movement have thrived on college campuses and elsewhere with the 1977 law on the books? Where are the arrested and imprisoned protesters?
But the liars have made their mark — and now Gillibrand, abandoning a good bill, effectively furthers their fallacious smear. That’s the behavior of a coward, which is surely not how New York’s junior senator wants to be known.
