Texas speech pathologist loses job over Israel boycott

A state-contracted speech pathologist in Texas lost her job after refusing to sign a pledge saying she would not boycott Israel, the result of increasingly common state legislation against the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that encourages boycotts of Israeli companies. The speech pathologist sued both the school district she worked for and the state, which was also sued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas, in a separate case attacking the law.

Key Player

Bahia Amawi has worked as a children’s speech pathologist and therapist in the Pflugerville Independent School District near Austin since 2009. Amawi, who is Palestinian American and has relatives living in the occupied West Bank territory, claims to be the only certified speech pathologist in the district who speaks Arabic, making her an important resource in Travis County, which has a growing Arabic-speaking immigrant community.

Further Details

For each of Amawi’s first nine years with the school district, she was able to renew her teaching contract without issue. But when the district offered her an extension in August 2018, it sent her, in addition to the usual documents, a newly required certification stating she would not boycott Israel while serving as a school district employee. The pledge stemmed from a Texas law passed in May 2017 that opposes the BDS movement, which for 11 years has sought to stigmatize Israel for its treatment of Palestinians.

“Anti-Israel policies are anti-Texas policies,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said upon signing the bill into law on May 2, 2017, Israel’s Independence Day, “and we will not tolerate such actions against an important ally.”

Though Amawi does not consider herself an activist, she chooses to avoid buying Israeli products to protest “Israel’s decades-long occupation of the West Bank and Gaza,” according to The Intercept. Amawi explained her decision not to sign the pledge as expressing her loyalty both to Palestinians and to the First Amendment.

“I couldn’t in good conscience do that,” Amawi told The Intercept. “If I did, I would not only be betraying Palestinians suffering under an occupation that I believe is unjust and thus, become complicit in their repression, but I’d also be betraying my fellow Americans by enabling violations of our constitutional rights to free speech and to protest peacefully.”

In the end, Amawi declined to sign the pledge.  The school district tried to find a way around making her sign, but it ultimately terminated her contract. Consequently, Amawi lost her job but continued to boycott products made in Israel.

Outcome

Amawi sues school district, state of Texas

Following her firing, Amawi sued the Pflugerville Independent School District and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for First Amendment infringements.

Gadeir Abbas, a lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations who is representing Amawi, said the required pledge represents skewed priorities. “The policy preferences of a foreign country are taking precedence over the needs of Bahia’s students,” Abbas told The New York Times. “Bahia’s decision to buy this kind of hummus and not that kind of hummus is her decision, and the Constitution protects it.”

Amawi agreed. “It’s baffling that they can throw this down our throats and decide to protect another country’s economy versus protecting our constitutional rights,” she said to The Intercept.

Separate from Amawi, ACLU sues Texas over anti-BDS law

On Dec. 18, 2018, the ACLU of Texas also sued the state, arguing the anti-BDS law is a violation of Texans’ First Amendments rights. The ACLU lawsuit, which is separate from but similar to Amawi’s, was filed on behalf of four other Texans who claim they have either lost work opportunities for refusing to sign the pledge or had to sign the pledge “against [their] conscience” to maintain their jobs.

The ACLU has also become involved in similar cases in Kansas, Arizona, and Arkansas.

Texas state lawmaker announces intention to clarify law

In the days after the ACLU’s lawsuit, Phil King, the Republican state representative who authored the original anti-BDS bill, said he will introduce legislation to clarify that the law was not intended to target individuals, such as Amawi and the four plaintiffs in the ACLU case.

The revisions “will simply clarify that the intent of the statute was never individuals or small proprietorships — it was always companies, enterprise-level operations” and this “should alleviate any concerns that are raised in those lawsuits,” King told USA Today.  

Background

Twenty-seven states have established anti-BDS laws or regulations in response to the growth of the BDS movement, as of this writing. Such restrictions have been ratified in red and blue states alike, usually by wide, bipartisan margins, according to The Washington Post. Behind this trend stand, among other players, members of the pro-Israel community in the United States. Groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have long pushed anti-BDS laws at the state and federal level. Most notably, AIPAC drafted and helped promote federal legislation passed in 2017 called the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which AIPAC and sponsoring senators said would ensure that suppliers of state services (i.e. contractors) not engage in anti-Israel boycotts. The widespread, bipartisan passage of these laws speaks to the ubiquitous favor Israel has historically enjoyed in the United States.

But that unconditional support is increasingly coming into question. As a 2019 Vox article explains, the Israel-Palestine issue has become divisive along partisan lines. Some liberal Democrats have come to side more with Palestinians, while Republicans, spurred by a rise in evangelical and Christian Zionist ideology (which views Israel as the cradle of Judaism and, by extension, Christianity) and post-9/11 fervor, have, as Vox puts it, become an “exceptionally hardline pro-Israel” faction.  Although there is no definitive connection between evangelicalism and anti-BDS support, The Intercept does note that King, the Republican who drafted the Texas anti-BDS law, is an evangelical.

Democrats tend to oppose anti-BDS laws for a number of reasons. To start, they view such rules as injurious to Free Speech: If applied to individuals like Amawi, some Democrats argue, they can and will punish people for expressing a particular political viewpoint. Boycotts, The Washington Post writes, have been a constitutionally protected form of Free Speech since 1982, following a Supreme Court decision in a case involving an NAACP boycott of white merchants in Mississippi. Moreover, the high court ruled in 1996, in a case involving an independent trash collector in Kansas who criticized the local government that hired him, that “the government cannot terminate a contract as punishment for the contractor’s exercise of free speech.” To this point, anti-BDS supporters contend that adhering to a boycott is an expression of economic rather than political intent, thereby making Amawi’s decision not to sign the pledge a punishable offense. Democratic support for Israel may have declined overall due to a variety of factors, including the Israeli occupation of the West Bank since 1967.

Clearly, BDS laws remain a legally contentious issue across the country. In Kansas, an anti-BDS law was struck down in federal court in January 2018 for infringing on the First Amendment rights of those critical of Israel; a similar verdict was handed down in Arizona in September 2018. However, in January 2019, a federal court in Arkansas decided to uphold anti-BDS measures, prompting lawsuits from the ACLU and others.

For many, the BDS controversy is reminiscent of the effort by states in the 1980s to pass laws related to the movement to boycott South Africa during the waning years of apartheid. In that case, state legislation came down against the South African government, while in this instance the states tend to be defending Israel. Any appearance that state governments are attempting to influence U.S. foreign policy frequently provokes criticism.