10 January 31 • 2019
jn

views

the big BDS bang

Democrats are itching for anti-
BDS bills on which to vote. The 
fact is that much of the anti-BDS 
legislation puts Democrats in an 
uncomfortable position, where 
they are forced into a bad choice of 
either being on the side of absolute 
support for Israel or absolute sup-
port for free speech, but not both. 
While none of the senators support 
BDS, many of them would rather 
see the issue go away. That is not 
to say that the bulk of Democratic 
senators will ultimately vote down 
anti-BDS legislation on the merits, 
but like any wedge issue that splits 
elected officials from vocal parts of 
their base, it is not a great place for 
them to be politically.
The Republicans know this, and 
they are in turn playing a deeply 
cynical political game with the 
BDS issue. By raising the BDS 
issue in the very first piece of leg-
islation coming from a new Senate 
but doing so while Congress was 
unable to pass a spending bill that 
President Donald Trump would 
sign, the Republican majority cre-
ated a campaign issue that is good 
for them but terrible for Israel’
s 
status as a bipartisan cause. It is 
glaringly obvious that Democrats 
are not going to allow legislation 
to proceed to debate that does not 
address the shutdown, but now 
Republicans are going to use Jan. 
8’
s cloture vote — in which only 
four Democrats voted to advance 
the bill — as alleged evidence that 
Democrats support BDS, including 
those like Schumer and Cardin 
whose pro-Israel bonafides are 
unimpeachable.
But Republicans did something 
even sneakier with the anti-BDS 
legislation than conflating objec-
tions on procedure with support 
for BDS. Rather than include the 
anti-BDS bill sponsored by Cardin 
and GOP Sen. Rob Portman target-
ing boycotts led by foreign govern-
ments and international organiza-
tion that was the result of months 
of negotiations and revisions in 
response to free speech objections 
from the ACLU and other groups, 
they used an anti-BDS bill that 
would affirm the right of state and 
local government to pass anti-
BDS legislation that has in some 

states already been struck down by 
courts as unconstitutional. 
In other words, rather than ask 
Senate Democrats to pass a bill 
that was the result of painstaking 
efforts to mitigate free speech 
concerns, they asked them to pass 
a bill that protects state and local 
legislation to which Democrats 
have legitimate free speech objec-
tions and that has already been 
successfully challenged. The fact 
that Democrats, including Cardin, 
sponsored a version of this bill 
before it was successfully chal-
lenged in courts makes it even 
better for Republicans politically, 
since they can truthfully — but 
nonetheless misleadingly — claim 
that the bill is bipartisan, ignoring 
the fact that there is a heaping pile 
of changed circumstances. None 
of these facts or details will make 
it through to 99.99 percent of the 
public, who will simply hear that 
Democrats do not want to combat 
BDS and that only Republicans 
can be trusted to safeguard Israel 
from this wishing to erode its legit-
imacy and destroy it as a Jewish 
state. This is not good for Israel, 
and this is not good for pro-Israel 
Democrats, but it is a master class 
in how to use procedural chicanery 
and wild unsupported accusations 
to turn support for Israel into a 
cudgel with which to beat your 
political enemies.
Get used to much more of this 
as the 2020 presidential cam-
paign season heats up. Democrats 
do indeed have a problem with 
some of their base on Israel, 
and Republicans are going to do 
all they can to make them take 
uncomfortable vote after uncom-
fortable vote, reaping whatever 
political wins they can rather than 
try and sustain bipartisan support 
for Israel as a policy goal. Praise 
the rock-solid support for Israel in 
the Republican Party all you want 
but ask yourself how pro-Israel 
it truly is to accelerate a process 
through which Israel becomes a 
partisan issue rather than trying to 
stem the tide. ■

 
Dr. Michael J. Koplow is Israel Policy Forum’
s 
Policy Director, based in Washington, D.C. 

continued from page 6

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