The Israeli NGO Shurat HaDin sent a letter to General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt Tuesday calling on him to cancel his company’s labor contracts with the the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America after the union endorsed the anti-Israel boycott movement last week, noting that the union’s actions may violate “numerous U.S. state and federal statutes.”
The letter (.pdf), co-written by Shurat HaDin president Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and Robert Tolchin, the organization’s American counsel, stated that GE “should not affiliate itself with any person or entity calling for a boycott based on national origin discrimination or anti-Semitism, or any similar effort against the Israeli government or the nation’s manufacturers, companies, products or services.”
The BDS [Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions] movement’s goal is solely the destruction of the State of Israel and its Jewish community. It masquerades as a human rights movement, but it is singularly fixated on Israel and Jews and ignores egregious human rights abuses that do not feed its anti-Israel agenda. Thus, it ignores Hamas terrorists who shoot rockets into Israeli civilian population centers with the expressed intention of killing civilians; it ignores ISIS thugs in Syria and Iraq who routinely violate every imaginable human right as they kidnap and rape children, behead prisoners of war, burn prisoners of war alive in steel cages, and destroy archaeological treasures; it ignores the Syrian regime, with the aid of Iran and its proxy Hezbollah, dropping barrel bombs on civilian population centers; and it ignores Iran’s efforts to obtain a nuclear bomb, which is particularly alarming given its stated goal of genocide against the Jewish population of Israel. For the BDS movement to claim that it is in favor of human rights while ignoring all this is rank hypocrisy. Accordingly, any effort by the [union] to single out and boycott the Jewish State is obviously hypocritical discrimination based upon national origin and religion, and clearly prohibited by federal and state law. …
“Implementing BDS policies could result in severe criminal and civil liability for The General Electric Company and its officers,” the letter warned.
A related press release from Shurat HaDin pointed out that the union’s support of the BDS movement was not only a violation of its own regulations, but also American law and GE’s corporate principles.
GE’s corporate policies prohibit bias in employment and commit the company to observe all applicable labor laws. And its website says that “diversity and inclusiveness” are essential to GE’s “productivity, creativity, innovation and competitive advantage.”
As a legal matter, a boycott is not protected by the freedom-of-speech language of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution because a boycott is not speech, it is action. Calls for and instruction in implementing unlawful actions are not protected speech. (See Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, 561 U.S. 1, 130 S. Ct. 2705 (2010).)
Ms. Darshan-Leitner said that the union’s outrageous call to support the boycott even violates the constitution of one of its own regional unions. “That document says the [union] is supposed to unite ‘all workers in our industry … regardless of craft, age, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, race, creed or political beliefs,'” she said.
Not only could GE incur legal liability for supporting BDS, but doing so wouldn’t make good business sense either, Darshan-Leitner said. “It would be absurd for any electronic manufacturer anywhere in the world, much less a publicly traded company like GE, to engage in or support a boycott of Israelis or Israeli manufacturers as Israel is a globally recognized high tech powerhouse and the source of much innovation in the electronics industry.”
Earlier this year, Illinois and South Carolina passed laws barring investments in companies that boycott Israel. After the Illinois law was passed, Northwestern University professor Eugene Kontorovich wrote in The Washington Post that the law”is part of a broad political revulsion over the long-simmering BDS movement…And that is because the message of the BDS movement – Israel as a uniquely villainous state – is fundamentally rejected by the vast majority of Americans.”
[Photo: Aurelien Guichard / Flickr ]