On February 13, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a stricter version of the so-called Israel Anti-Boycott Act (IABA), a bill that had been stalled since 2018 over objections that it violates the First Amendment rights of U.S. citizens. The amended legislation would impose up to twenty years of imprisonment and fines of up to $1 million for those who participate in boycotts promoted by international governmental organizations, or IGOs, such as the U.N. Human Rights Council.
The previous version’s purview was limited to boycotts “fostered or imposed by foreign countries,” a prohibition that dates to the 1979 Export Administration Act (EAA) and originally sought to counter a boycott of Israel by Arab states. Opponents of the 2018 bill say the recent amendments, known together as H.R. 3016, go a step further by limiting the ability of Americans to rely on IGO reports—including those with information on illegal Israeli settlements and the businesses profiting from them—to guide their activism.
“Whereas the EAA was meant to protect American companies from economic coercion by foreign governments, H.R. 3016 would punish Americans for their purely voluntary, and constitutionally protected, participation in political boycott campaigns,” the American Civil Liberties Union noted in a letter to House members on the eve of the vote. The letter adds that “the First Amendment strictly prohibits the government from criminalizing political dissent, including when that dissent is expressed through a voluntary boycott.”
The IABA’s new amendments—first proposed in April of last year by Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican from New York’s Seventeenth District, and Democrat Josh Gottheimer, of New Jersey’s Fifth District—strip the bill of any mention of Israel, but Lawler is on record saying that the revised legislation, now known as the “IGO Anti-Boycott Act,” was “spurred on by bad actors that have sought to embargo Israel using BDS,” or Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions.
H.R. 3016 is one of five similar bills pending in Congress, according to Palestine Legal, which monitors federal and state attempts to curb pro-Palestine advocacy through legislation. So far, thirty-eight states have passed laws aimed at countering the BDS movement for Palestinian rights. Some of these bills include requirements that state contractors pledge not to boycott Israel, while others require states to “compile public blacklists of entities that boycott for Palestinian rights or support BDS,” Palestine Legal says.
In 2017, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of a Kansas public school educator who was asked to disavow a boycott of Israel as a condition for payment. That suit was dismissed after the state amended its law to apply only to businesses and contracts exceeding $100,000. The 2021 film Boycott tells the stories of three Americans who launched similar legal battles against anti-BDS restrictions in their states.
The February 13 vote on H.R. 3016 follows a raft of pro-Israel legislation passed since the attacks in southern Israel by Hamas on October 7, 2023, which claimed about 1,200 lives—approximately 30 percent of them soldiers—according to the Israeli government. In just the first month following those attacks, in which an average of more than 100 Palestinians were killed each day, the House passed seven bills aimed at supporting Israel, including through supplemental military aid, condemnation of “all forms of antisemitism,” and expanded sanctions on Iran.
In a post on X just after H.R. 3016 passed by a voice vote—in which support is felt to be so overwhelming that individual vote counts are deemed unnecessary—Lawler said the legislation will enable the U.S. government to “strike back” at IGOs “supporting the twisted and nefarious plans of the anti-Israel and antisemitic BDS movement.” Whether the bill will pass in the Senate remains to be seen, however, and court challenges appear likely. As precedent, critics point to a 1982 Supreme Court decision, NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co., which reversed a hefty financial judgment against the civil rights organization for its seven-year boycott of white merchants in Claiborne County, Mississippi.
“The bill would make it a federal felony to furnish information to an international governmental organization, such as the U.N. Human Rights Council, about whether any person has business relationships with or in the boycotted country,” the ACLU noted in its February 12 letter to House members. “Such naming-and-shaming techniques were among the forms of boycott-facilitating speech expressly identified in Claiborne Hardware.”
Beyond its legality, the bill is also impractical. To enforce it, federal officials would presumably need to monitor individual Americans’ consumer choices, looking for signs that they are avoiding certain products as part of an organized boycott. For pro-Palestine advocates like twenty-eight-year-old Chance Zurub of Cleveland, Ohio, that kind of policing would be par for the course. “This bill serves as a way to silence an entirely grassroots effort showing that our dollars—and where we spend them—matter,” he says.
“This bill serves as a way to silence an entirely grassroots effort showing that our dollars—and where we spend them—matter.” — Chance Zurub of Cleveland, Ohio
Zurub is part of a group of activists who have been pushing the Cleveland City Council to consider a Gaza ceasefire resolution similar to those passed in other Ohio cities. Despite polls showing overwhelming support among Americans for a ceasefire, the council has refused to consider a draft resolution, even after weeks of peaceful protest and testimony from concerned citizens.
By restricting Americans’ ability to boycott products and companies that support Israel’s assault on Gaza, which the International Court of Justice said could plausibly amount to genocide, Congress would further embolden the kind of anti-democratic behavior on display in state and local governments. That our elected representatives would do so on behalf of an Israeli government that has killed more than 12,300 Palestinian children, all while deliberately starving the surviving civilian population, is likely to boost support for BDS, not slow it.
“If Americans want to buy and consume responsibly,” Zurub adds, “our elected representatives should recognize the will of their constituents, not restrict them on behalf of a foreign government that is currently engaged in some of the most depraved acts of the twenty-first century.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. government’s behavior on the world stage suggests that it has no qualms ignoring public opinion in the service of Israel’s war on Gaza. On February 20, the United States vetoed, for the third time, a ceasefire resolution that was supported by all but one of the U.N. Security Council’s other members, with the lone dissent coming in the form of an abstention by the United Kingdom.
The measure would have called for a temporary halt to fighting amid a near-total freeze of aid shipments to northern Gaza, where, as of this writing, hundreds of thousands of besieged Palestinians face an imminent famine. A further 1.4 million are trapped inside the enclave’s southern tip, with nowhere left to flee from ongoing Israeli air and ground attacks. Instead of yielding to U.S. pressure, the dire situation is being met by more arms transfers to Israel, making the U.S. government potentially complicit in Israel’s act of possible genocide, according to some legal experts.
Despite the urgency—felt most by the hungry and homeless people of Gaza—ending U.S. support for Israel’s war against the enclave and its occupation of Palestinian lands will take long-term political change that begins at the local level. During the struggle for Black liberation in South Africa, for example, that change was fueled by networks of citizens like the Ohio Coalition Against Apartheid, which galvanized trade unions, churches, and student groups around a common agenda of boycott and divestment.
Whether Americans of conscience can affect the same change in U.S. policy toward Israel may hinge less on their ability to mobilize popular protests and more on the willingness of politicians to allow them. In that sense, Gaza is a bellwether, not only of the international order’s precipitous demise, but of democracy’s, too.