Glenn Greenwald talking:
there are 26 states in the U.S. that have some version of this Texas law. They’re not all as severe as the one in Texas, though many of them are. Others have various kinds of restrictions on people who boycott Israel, prohibiting the expenditure of any funds to invest in companies, for example, or in pension funds, that have companies that invest—that advocate a boycott of Israel. They all have one thing in common, which is that they impose limitations on the opportunities and abilities of private citizens or private companies that support or participate in the boycott of Israel.
I think the most extreme example, Amy, that actually stuns me the most, is Andrew Cuomo in New York, who in 2016 issued an executive order, because he couldn’t get it passed through the Legislature, barring New York state agencies from doing business with companies that boycott Israel. And he actually ordered them to compile a public list, that would be published on a website, of any companies that were found to be boycotting Israel—yes, I can.
the law imposed, yeah, by Andrew Cuomo in New York, where he ordered the agencies to use public information to compile a list of companies who said they were boycotting.
In the case of Texas, they’re really just relying on the word of the contractor. So, Bahia or others could just lie and say, “I promise not to boycott Israel,” even though they really are. Presumably, you could get someone fired if you find out that they really are supporting the boycott of Israel.
And the point I was making about New York and other states is that, at the same time that, for example, Governor Cuomo ordered a boycott—or, barred a boycott of Israel, two months earlier, he ordered his state employees to boycott North Carolina in protest of an anti-LGBT law that that state had adopted. So, in Andrew Cuomo’s worldview and the worldview of Texas, you’re allowed to boycott other American states and harm American businesses and be employed; you’re just not allowed to harm or boycott this one foreign country, Israel. You can boycott Canada or Russia or anybody else. It’s just special protection for Israel, that not even American businesses enjoy. That’s what makes it so shocking.
So, last year, a Democratic senator from Maryland, Benjamin Cardin, who’s one of the most loyal AIPAC supporters, introduced a bill that would actually make it a crime, a felony, to participate in an international boycott of Israel. And it attracted 43 co-sponsors—29 Republicans, 14 Democrats. And the ACLU screamed and yelled about this. They issued warnings saying this is one of the gravest threats to free speech they had ever seen. A bunch of Democratic senators who had co-sponsored it, like Kirsten Gillibrand and other, withdrew their support.
But now Cardin is back with a somewhat watered-down version, but still very threatening, that’s designed to uphold the state laws and also to allow financial penalties on the federal level for anyone participating in a boycott. He’s trying to sneak it through a bill that has to be passed, the lame-duck budget bill, so there’s no separate vote on this. He would just sneak it in there. And the ACLU is trying to do everything they can to warn people of the grave threat posed by Senator Cardin and his allies to make it a federal crime to participate in the boycott of Israel.
It is having an impact. In fact, we now have two members of Congress, newly elected members of Congress, who are the first Muslim women to be elected to the Congress. They’re celebrated stars of the Democratic Party. And they both explicitly support the boycott of Israel. So, you have some members of the Democratic Party, like Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer, who say that boycotting Israel is anti-Semitic. But now you have this new generation of Democrats who are much more critical of Israel, including two who support the boycott. It’s spread on U.S. campuses. It’s spreading throughout Western Europe. There are Jewish groups who are so offended by the occupation that they now support the boycott of Israel.
So you’re absolutely right, Juan. The reason why there’s a worldwide effort to criminalize and suppress and punish it is precisely because they worry that the same thing will happen to Israel as what happened to the apartheid regime in the 1980s in South Africa when they were targeted with an identical boycott, which is the regime and the repression finally fell. And that’s what they’re most concerned about.
The Airbnb case is really interesting, because they didn’t say they were going to delist all apartments or properties in Israel proper; they said only in the occupied territory of the West Bank, which the U.N., at the end of 2016, ruled was an illegal occupation. And one of the interesting things about the Texas law that makes it so offensive is it not only bars people from boycotting companies in Israel, but also Israeli companies in the West Bank. You’re not even allowed to do the milder, more mainstream version of the boycott aimed just at the illegal settlements in the West Bank that even the U.N. said was illegal.
And now there’s a dispute: Has Airbnb really caved in to the pressure and reversed their policy? Israel says they have; Airbnb is denying it. But that’s where these laws that we’ve been just talking about come into play and are so pernicious. Imagine if you’re an Airbnb executive. You could stand to lose a lot of state business, because there’s so many laws now in so many states—and it might be national—barring governments from entering into contracts with you as a company if you in any way boycott Israel. And this is the coordination that they’re trying to impose to prevent this kind of boycott from succeeding.
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Glenn Greenwald
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of the founding editors of The Intercept.
— source democracynow.org | Dec 18, 2018