For the third time, a federal judge blocks an Israel boycott ban on First Amendment grounds
Bahia Amawi, an elementary school speech pathologist from Round Rock, Tex., sued after losing her job for refusing to sign a pro-Israel oath. A federal judge ruled in her favor on Thursday. By Isaac Stanley-Becker Isaac Stanley-Becker Reporter based in the U.K. Email Bio Follow April 26 at 5:22 AM Bahia Amawi was driving to her children’s Taekwondo tournament near Austin on Thursday when her phone began to buzz.
In a 56-page opinion, Pitman, an Obama appointee, found that the state could not prohibit boycotting the state of Israel as a condition of public employment. His holding is the third by a federal judge since last year to turn back state legislation that aims to use public money to deter anti-Israel activity.
Among those states was Texas. The legislature’s 2017 “anti-BDS bill,” as it was called, compelled anyone entering into a contract with the state to sign a “written verification” vowing not to boycott Israel. The law’s champions declared, “Anti-Israel policies are anti-Texas policies.” His decision is in line with a similar judgment last September, when a federal judge in Arizona said the state could not require companies to submit a written pledge attesting that they were not boycotting Israel. That decision followed an opinion in January 2018 from a federal judge in Kansas, who ruled for the first time that enforcing a state provision requiring contractors to sign a no-boycott certification violated expressive rights guaranteed under the First Amendment.
To Homer, the ruling was evidence that the tide was turning against such measures, likened by its critics to blacklists. After seeing the victory in Texas, people targeted by the legislation in other states, she said, would be more inclined to seek out her organization, or the American Civil Liberties Union, which has also been battling the laws in the courts.
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