Produced by the Foundation for Middle East Peace in cooperation with Americans for Peace Now, where the Legislative Round-Up was conceived
Shameless self-promotion: Debate continues to swirl around the "Israel Anti-Boycott Act" and the threat it poses to Constitutionally-protected free speech. This week, Churches for Middle East Peace hosted a webinar examining the legislation and related issues, featuring FMEP's Lara Friedman - video of the webinar is here.
It has been said before that — and forgive us for channeling F. Scott Fitzgerald — politicians are different from you and me. Nowhere is the simple maxim of the Lost Generation’s preeminent writer more evident than in U.S. Rep. Richard Neal’s performance during Friday’s town-hall-style forum at Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield. Click here to see the full forum on video.
The congressman is a smooth-talking operator fluent in a variety of issues, most notably tax policy — an expertise borne no doubt from his 24 years on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee. But despite his extensive knowledge of tariffs and revenue raising, Neal showed a troubling unfamiliarity with free speech issues in fielding questions from audience members about his sponsorship of a bill that raises obvious First Amendment questions.
Neal co-sponsored a highly controversial bill, the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which opposes a United Nations Human Rights Council resolution urging countries to pressure companies to divest from Israel. The controversy lies mostly in the second part of the bill, which prohibits Americans engaged in interstate or foreign commerce from supporting an international boycott of Israel. Violations are punishable by a fine of up to a $1 million and 20 years in prison.
On its face, the prohibition against participating in boycotts sounds like a glaring departure from the American tradition of free speech. The American Civil Liberties Union has attacked the bill as “antithetical to free speech protections enshrined in the First Amendment” and urged the Senate to reject it.
On the other hand, some reputable legal scholars have argued that “federal law has for decades generally banned participation in boycotts of friendly nations” and that such bans only place prohibitions on commercial activity, not on actual speech.
Be that as it may, Cheryl Hogan of Charlemont pleaded with Neal to reconsider his support of the legislation, noting to much applause that she sees “that law not only as really stepping on our constitutional rights to free speech, but also attacking the one powerful nonviolent resistance movement that there is to try to change what we see happening in the Middle East.”
Neal’s response was revealing. He said he would ask Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Maryland) for “clarification” in order “to eliminate the idea that there might be a problem with free speech.” Neal added that he had read the Congressional Research Service’s report on the legislation and “and I came to the conclusion that there is no threat to free speech” because “this is about commercial activity.”
You might expect Daniel Shapiro, Barack Obama’s ambassador to Israel, to dismiss the Trump administration’s rickety
Israeli-Palestinian peace brokering efforts.
Surprisingly, Shapiro believes that Trump and his aides have only marginally strayed from traditional U.S. policies on the issue. In fact, he says, more than in any other policy arena, the Trump administration is exercising more continuity and adherence to past administrations’ policies in the field of Israeli-Palestinian relations.
This episode is based on a September 14th 2017 APN briefing call with Ambassador Shapiro. It is preceded by a conversation between APN’s Stephanie Breitsman, Debra Shushan and Ori Nir, PeaceCast’s host.
Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent APN's views and policy positions.
This week, Alpher discusses the National Union's (a faction of the Jewish Home party) plan for annexing all of the West Bank and either expelling or disenfranchising its Arab residents; what other right-wing members of Netanyahu’s coalition say on the issues of annexation and the subsequent rights of West Bank Palestinians; what advocates of more minimalistic annexation say; whether anyone in Israel wants to annex everything and give all Arab residents of expanded Israel full democratic rights; and the bottom line.
Q. Does the absence of a Palestinian state threaten Israel? How?
A. Yes, it threatens Israel, and in more ways than one.
Without an Arab-state political affiliation for the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel is
universally seen as their occupier. Not a single state in the world recognizes the terms “Judea and Samaria” or
Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem. The possibility of restoring a pre-1967 political link, say by
affiliating the West Bank in some way with Jordan, has ceased to be realistic in Arab eyes for several decades.
This is so despite the fact that some Israeli right-wingers cut off from regional realities and international
standards of human rights argue that West Bank Palestinians could enjoy autonomy under Israel and vote in
Jordanian elections.
Nor is the paternalistic proposal put forth by some on the Israeli right—to the effect that Palestinians in the
West Bank can in perpetuity enjoy “human” rights but not citizenship rights on the land where they live--
viable in the eyes of Palestinians or anyone else in the world. Palestinian Arabs today identify as
Palestinians in a political sense. If they cannot achieve sovereign statehood, the only fallback position they
are likely to recognize is Israeli citizenship within the framework of a single state.
This brings us to the demographic issue. Most demographers today argue that there are already more Arabs than
Jews in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Some on the Israeli right argue that the
totality of Arabs is “only” 40 percent of the total population, meaning Jews constitute 55 percent (another
five percent of Israelis are neither Jewish nor Arab). In some cases this figure is achieved by ignoring the
two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, a highly problematic geopolitical determination. In other cases it
is achieved by radically underestimating the number of Palestinians in the West Bank and ignoring the 300,000
Palestinians in East Jerusalem.
One way or another, even an Israeli state with a 40 percent (and growing!) Arab minority cannot claim to be
intrinsically Jewish. As for a non-democratic state that favors its Jewish over its Arab inhabitants, this is
anathema to the vast majority of Jews, to say nothing of the international community. It places Israel in the
global family of racist, fascist countries whose prospects for enlightened progress are zero.
