As reported Wednesday in numerous outlets, a group of 43 Democratic and Republican U.S. senators have teamed up to introduce a bill, drafted with the help of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, that would make any support for boycotts of Israel over its occupation of the West Bank a felony, subject to fines of up to $1 million and twenty years in prison. (A parallel House bill is now up to 237 sponsors, already enough for passage.) The bill’s bipartisan backing — both Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand are on board — has already led the ACLU to issue a letter warning the Senate that the legislation would unconstitutionally “impose civil and criminal punishment on individuals solely because of their political beliefs about Israel and its policies.”
What, exactly, the bill would outlaw is in dispute: Senators Ben Cardin and Rob Portman, the bill’s primary sponsors, wrote back to the ACLU todaythat the bill is “narrowly targeted at commercial activity,” not personal participation in boycotts; Gillibrand seems to agree, with her spokesperson telling the Intercept that “we have a different read of the specific bill language” and offering to sit down with the ACLU to discuss it. (Schumer’s office, meanwhile, provided a link to a floor speech in which the senator called Israel boycotts “the reinvented form of anti-Semitism.”)