Peace Plans, BDS and
Iran
As of this writing, the President has not
unveiled his peace initiative, but indications
are that the Palestinian Arabs will again reject
it out of hand, no matter what it says. ZOA’s
concern has always been that there will be
elements of the plan that will require Israeli
concessions, and that even after the PLO
and the Palestinian Authority (PA) reject the
plan, future Israeli governments might use
conditional acceptance by Israel to claim the
harmful concessions are already established.
This has happened before. The status quo
with the PA is that they are getting very
little U.S. aid due to their rejectionism and
refusal to give up “pay to slay” compensation
for terrorists directly from their budget. President
Abbas (in the 15th year of his four-year
term) continues to refuse to meet with senior
U.S. diplomats.
BDS is intrinsically a scheme to destroy
Israel by alternative means. It will fail, and
everywhere it is promoted, it reveals its
adherents as extremists. Much of the legislative
activity against BDS is at the state level;
individual states have passed laws making it
impossible for a business to contract with
the state if they are boycotting Israel. At the
federal level, the current battle is to pass
technical legislation ensuring that federal
laws do not conflict with these state efforts.
The Senate passed a bill (S. 1) in February
2019, which included these provisions, but
the House has not yet passed equivalent
legislation. Instead, the House passed a nonbinding
resolution that disapproved of BDS,
and added a spurious endorsement of establishing
a Palestinian Arab state at the same
time. Our opponents are raising groundless
First Amendment objections to passing a
House version of S. 1, which is, in fact, constitutional.
32 Government Relations