February 7, 2014 - Brandeis Center

Yesterday Congressmen Peter Roskam and Dan Lipinski introduced anti-boycott legislation to prevent academic boycotts against the State of Israel. This bill would supplement existing federal and state anti-boycott statutes that were passed decades ago in response to the Arab boycott of Israel. Specifically, this bill would block federal funding for universities that engage in anti-Israel boycotts. Rep. Roskam’s press release appears in full below:

Rep. Peter Roskam

Feb 6, 2014

Press Release

Oren: “I strongly support this courageous initiative.”

WASHINGTON, D.C.— Today, Reps. Peter Roskam (R-IL) and Dan Lipinski (D-IL) introduced the bipartisan Protect Academic Freedom Act (H.R. 4009) to address the growing threat of unjustified boycotts against the Jewish State of Israel. In December 2013, the American Studies Association (ASA) became the second major educational organization to adopt an academic boycott of Israel. This measure would block federal funding for American universities engaging in a boycott of Israeli academic institutions or scholars to ensure that taxpayer dollars are not used to fund bigoted attacks against Israel that undermine the fundamental principles of academic freedom.

“This bipartisan legislation seeks to preserve academic freedom and combat bigotry by shielding Israel from unjust boycotts. It is ludicrous for critics to go after our democratic friend and ally Israel when they should be focusing on the evils perpetrated by repressive, authoritarian regimes like Iran and North Korea,” said Congressman Roskam, the Chief Deputy Whip and co-chair of the House Republican Israel Caucus. “These boycotts not only threaten educational cooperation between the United States and Israel, but ultimately undermine the academic goals of all nations. Congress has a responsibility to fight back against these hateful campaigns, which contradict academic freedom and are designed to delegitimize the Jewish State of Israel. I’m so thankful for the wisdom and leadership of Ambassador Michael Oren, who has helped raise awareness for this important effort.” (more…)

Boston attorney Jeffrey S. Robbins has a great new piece on Scarlett Johansson in the Boston Herald today. It begins like this:

Scarlett Johansson takes on anti-Israel crowd

In front of the SodaStream plant just outside Jerusalem there is a statue that contains the prophet Isaiah’s exhortation: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” This is not a statue one necessarily expects to find outside a beverage-maker factory, let alone in the hotly-disputed West Bank.

Scarlett Johansson
(source: Wikipedia)

The SodaStream factory is not just any factory, however. In 1996 an Israeli startup converted it from a munitions plant into one that manufactures at-home soda makers, a green-friendly enterprise aimed at weaning consumers away from environmentally-harmful plastic bottles.

SodaStream’s plant has created jobs for 950 Palestinian and Israeli Arabs and 350 Israeli Jews without regard to citizenship or ethnicity. Arabs and Jews work, eat and socialize together, an example of the kind of positive coexistence that is found far more regularly in Israel than conflict-centric media coverage usually suggests.

The company’s global growth has been enormous. It went public in 2010 and is listed on Nasdaq. But Soda-Stream does not only illustrate Israel’s reputation as “startup nation.” It illustrates what the end of conflict could look like in a region afflicted not only by conflict, but by the sort of moral stupidity that is the conflict’s all-too-frequent by-product.

Recently, SodaStream has been targeted by anti-Israel boycotters based on the fact that the plant is located in the West Bank. Of course, the community in which it is located, Ma’ale Adumim, a city of 40,000 with 21 schools and 80 kindergartens located a couple of miles from Jerusalem, is acknowledged by both Palestinians and Israelis as slated to be part of Israel in any peace deal, compensated for by land swaps. The Soda-Stream plant provides jobs for Palestinians whose leaders chose to decimate the Palestinian economy by launching a multi-year campaign of bombings in the early 2000s….