This week Iowa’s GOP Governor Kim Reynolds signed two bills into law related to Israel. One targets companies outside the United States that “boycott” Israel. The other adopts the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism across the state.
“Today we express Iowa’s enduring support for the State of Israel and our categorical rejection of anti-Semitism,” said Reynolds, who signed the legislation during a meeting with Israeli Consul General to the Midwest Yinam Cohen. “Together, these bills send an important message: Iowa continues to stand shoulder to shoulder with the State of Israel, one of America’s most important and reliable allies while fighting all forms of religious and ethnic discrimination.”
In 2016 Iowa’s former Governor Terry Branstad signed an anti-BDS bill into law that prohibits state funds from being used by companies that boycott Israel. However the new legislation, HF2373, expands the measure to include subsidiaries, parent companies, and affiliates.
HF2373 is clearly aimed at Ben & Jerry’s, as the ice cream company announced it would stop doing business in illegal Israeli settlements last year. Ben & Jerry’s statement made it clear that they will continue to operate in Israel and don’t support the BDS movement, but this hasn’t stopped state lawmakers from targeting it’s London-based parent company Unilever. A coalition of attorney generals are pushing for the company to keep operating in the settlements, while states divest from Unilever or threaten blacklisting.
While HF2373 made its way through Iowa’s House earlier this year, State Rep. Mary Wolfe explained its function succinctly: “As far as I can tell, the sole purpose of this bill is to amend Iowa Code so that Iowa is able to crack down on Unilever for allowing Ben & Jerry’s to refuse to sell their ice cream in the occupied Palestinian territories.”
HF2220 makes Iowa the twenty-third state to adopt the IHRA working definition of antisemitism. The definition, which has been embraced by the Biden administration, includes some criticisms of Israel. The definition “brands critics of Israel and advocates for Palestinian rights as anti-Jewish blurring the important distinctions between criticism of Israel as a nation-state and antisemitism,” reads a Palestine Legal explainer from 2020. “In fact, Jewish people and the Israeli state are not one and the same. Over half the world’s Jewish population lives outside of Israel. Over twenty percent of Israel’s population is not Jewish. The inaccurate assumption that the Israeli government represents Jewish people worldwide is itself antisemitic because it necessarily attributes Israeli government policies and practices to all Jews.”
Even the lead author of the definition, Kenneth Stern, has cautioned against using it in schools. “The definition was intended for data collectors writing reports about anti-Semitism in Europe,” he explained in a 2016 New York Times op-ed. “It was never supposed to curtail speech on campus.”
The American Jewish Committee (AJC), which helped draft the original IHRA text, put out a statement celebrating both bills. “We thank Governor Reynolds for signing into law a measure that directs Iowa to recognize the globally recognized definition of antisemitism from the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance…which sends an important message that Iowa will take a zero-tolerance approach to anti-Jewish hatred,” it reads. “We are also grateful that Governor Reynolds signed legislation that restricts the ability of companies that boycott Israel to do business with state agencies. Governor Reynolds has been to Israel and has worked to create lasting partnerships with companies there. This measure affirms the state will not tolerate ethnic and religious discrimination and will strengthen the strong bonds between Iowa and Israel.”
Critics of the measures have also voiced their displeasure. Earlier this month the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) issued a statement warning about the implications of these bills. “These new laws…expand the definition of antisemitism to encompass political speech, with several discriminatory effects,” it reads. “Political critiques of Israeli state actions—including discrimination and violence against Palestinians—become subject to the charge of antisemitism, skewing the social and legal meaning of equality and obscuring other prohibited forms of discrimination.”
“By signing this unconstitutional anti-boycott bill into law, Governor Reynolds has violated the free speech rights of Iowa residents who want to express support for Palestinian human rights,” said CAIR National Deputy Director Edward Ahmed Mitchell in a statement. “This doomed and un-American law is just as unconstitutional as anti-boycott laws struck down by courts in other states.”
The brazen lying and censorship on Israel’s behalf is increasingly breathtaking. Is the First Amendment on the eve of destruction?
More ever growing good news from my Canadian friend:
AMS Council votes to urge UBC to divest from companies complicit in Palestinian human rights violations (ubyssey.ca)
THE UBYSSEY, (University of British Columbia newspaper) March 24/22, by Elif Kayali
“AMS Council votes to urge UBC to divest from companies complicit in Palestinian human rights violations.”“Cheers erupted in Michael Kingsmill Forum last night at around 9:40 p.m. when AMS Council voted ‘yes’ to urge the university to divest from companies involved in or complicit in human rights violations against Palestinians.
“The student society agreed to pen a letter condemning ‘the Israeli state’s system of apartheid and its occupation of Palestine’ and calling on the Board of Governors and UBC to divest from nine companies.
“The nine companies either appear in the UN database for businesses involved in activities that were deemed to be ‘human rights violations concerns’ in a report following an independent international fact-finding mission, or companies that have been cited to be violating the human rights of Palestinians.
“Proposed by a Divestment Coalition of 20 student groups, the motion was approved after a three-hour debate. The motion previously passed the AMS Advocacy Committee unanimously.
“Yahya Abdul Ghani, a Palestinian fourth-year political science student and a member of the Divestment Coalition, said this motion could prove ‘that UBC cares [about Palestinian students] and they’re willing to do something.’
“’When I first came to UBC, I was constantly told about ‘ancestral, traditional, unceded territory,’ showing that UBC is against occupation. And in my lifetime, when I grow up, I do not want to ever have to make a land statement about Palestine,’ Ghani added.”
“Together, these bills send an important message: Iowa continues to stand shoulder to shoulder with the State of Israel, one of America’s most important and reliable allies while fighting all forms of religious and ethnic discrimination.”
This is possibly one of the most dystopian Orwellian sentences to come from an elected US official I have read in quite so time.
Not to mention that if the Jewish state, self proclaimed leader, voice, and custodian of the world’s Jews and Jewish character, and its pro-Israel proxies truly wanted to shed the disgusting blood libels and tropes of Jewish control from behind the curtains, and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, you’d think they’d try just a little bit harder to not virtually recreate images and themes of Nazi propaganda cartoons and posters, as they standing over US leaders while they are forcing through unbelievably unconstitutional and undemocratic laws on the sole behalf of a foreign nation. Because they sure as shit have no qualms calling and labelling anyone and everyone as an anti-Semite for pointing this exact behavior.
One might fruitfully ask why Iowa, from among the fifty states, would pass a truly “doomed”, law such as HF2373? I’d wager that even if all fifty states adopted laws identical to Iowa’s and enforced them with a special “Zionist ICE Cream Police Force” the effect would likely be negligible-to-zero for Unilever.
In reality though, it is not because Iowa, or the legislatures of any of the 35 states that have passed anti-BDS laws, have any burning political passion for Israel/Zionism that their legislatures have approved these pathetic laws: They are doing so because getting them through the state legislature is a cheap, easy, fast and performative way for them to publicly genuflect before organized Zionism.
HF237 will be bruited about endlessly by every Iowa state representative who signed on to the legislation as evidence of their servility to Zionism, and thereby reinforce their continued status as deserving recipients of campaign funds, votes, junkets to Israel and associated perks. Every single fund-raising email henceforth will blare out the incumbent’s heroic, value-reinforcing and red-blooded American defense of a desperately threatened ally. Dollars to donuts.
Is there any potential downside for politicians who champion anti-BDS laws? No, there is none. One day, soon I hope, SCOTUS will hear a case on the constitutionality of anti-BDS laws and if the scorecard of the state-level judicial decisions from the cases that have already (successfully) challenged anti-BDS laws is any indication, it will almost assuredly find for the Constitution and not Zionism.
If and when that does happen all the state legislators will be able say to their Zionist handlers: “Hey, we did everything you asked of us. We even tried to strip the American people of an established Constitutional right in your service. We did EXACTLY as Dillon Hosier instructed us to do. We obeyed. But we don’t control SCOTUS so don’t blame us and by the way can I count on your continued support for my re-election?”
The Orwellian hubris of Zionism’s attempts to impose on Americans specific political language, outlaw specific democratic behavior and demonize specific demographics would, I think, have fascinated Orwell. Indeed, there is much about Zionism, here and in Israel, that he might have included in “1984” and “Animal Farm”.
Q:Is it antisemitic according to IHRA to consider anti-BDS laws unconstitutional?
View here 500+ Palestine posters on BDS