• tal@lemmy.today
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    3 days ago

    You think that he’d just use existing authorities.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws

    The specific provisions of anti-BDS laws vary widely. Legislation, to any degree, against boycotts of Israel is prevalent in much of the Western world, and especially in the United States, which has been Israel’s closest ally on the international stage since the 1960s.

    As of 2024, 38 states have passed bills and executive orders designed to discourage boycotts of Israel.[6] Many of them have been passed with broad bipartisan support.[7] Most anti-BDS laws have taken one of two forms: contract-focused laws requiring government contractors to promise that they are not boycotting Israel; and investment-focused laws, mandating public investment funds to avoid entities boycotting Israel.[8] Separately, the U.S. Congress has considered anti-boycott legislation in reaction to the BDS movement. The U.S. Senate passed S.1, which contained anti-boycott provisions, on 28 January 2019, by a vote of 74–19. The U.S. House passed a resolution condemning the boycott of Israel on 24 July 2019, by a vote of 398–17. Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Mike Braun (R-IN), Rick Scott (R-FL), Bill Hagerty (R-TN), and Steve Daines (R-MT) reintroduced the Combating BDS Act of 2023.

    Roskam and co-sponsor Juan Vargas introduced another anti-BDS bill, United States-Israel Trade and Commercial Enhancement Act (H.R. 825), in February 2015. According to them, the bill would “leverage ongoing trade negotiations to discourage prospective U.S. trade partners from engaging in economic discrimination against Israel” through the monitoring of pro-BDS activities of foreign companies that trade on American stock exchanges and by prohibiting American courts from “enforcing rulings made by foreign courts against American companies solely for conducting business in Israel”.[59] However, the bill did not impose penalties for supporting BDS. Roskam justified the bill, which could affect negotiations for the Transatlantic Free Trade Area, by claiming that there were a large number of countries that have embraced BDS.[60][61]

    The Anti-Boycott Act of 2018, passed as part of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019, does not target boycotts against Israel specifically, but makes it illegal to “comply with, further, or support any boycott fostered or imposed by any foreign country, against a country which is friendly to the United States” 50 U.S.C. § 4842 and as the Office of Antiboycott Compliance notes “The Arab League boycott of Israel is the principal unsanctioned foreign boycott that U.S. persons must be concerned with today.”[65]