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A U.S. pro-Israel legal group is setting up a whistleblower hotline to identify British companies that cut ties with Israeli businesses after the U.K. banned goods from West Bank settlements, and plans to press American states to divest from them, The Telegraph reports.
The National Jewish Advocacy Center said Thursday the hotline would take reports from “employees, suppliers and customers” about “British companies that have started cutting off Israeli businesses because of the new measures.”
The group said it would refer those firms to states and encourage officials to pull public money out of them.
The campaign relies on anti-boycott statutes on the books in most states, which can restrict public contracts with companies that boycott Israel or require public funds to divest from them.
“Britain has ordered its companies into a trap it never mapped,” Mark Goldfeder, the center’s director, told The Telegraph.
“Many American states, Texas and Florida among them, bar public contracts with, and force pension divestment from, any company that limits commercial relations with Israelis or Israel,” he said.
“The words are in the statutes, and Austin and Tallahassee do not run their lists on Whitehall’s definitions.”
The British measure does not require companies to stop trading with Israel. Announced Tuesday by Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband, it bars imports of goods made in settlements and prohibits U.K. firms from supplying financing, construction, infrastructure, real estate, and advertising services to them.
Miliband said the regime targets “illegal settlements and settlement expansion, not Israel,” and said he “wholeheartedly” opposes the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign. Settlement goods account for less than 1% of U.K.-Israel trade.
There is precedent.
Ben & Jerry’s announced in 2021 that it would end sales in Israeli-occupied territory. New York, New Jersey, and Illinois moved hundreds of millions of dollars out of its London-based parent, Unilever, which sold its Israeli operation to a local licensee the next year.
Republican officials echoed the warning in posts the newspaper cited. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders wrote on X: “Arkansas law makes clear that we won’t do business with any company that deliberately chooses to engage in BDS activities. Period.”
Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., said a Florida law he passed as a state legislator would bar any British company forced to comply from doing business with state or local government there.
“Florida is one of Britain’s largest trading partners,” Fine said. “They should understand that their vanity project in support of Muslim terror could cost them billions of dollars.”
Miliband said the British government agrees there is “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in areas of the West Bank, perpetrated by settler terrorists.”
Israel closed Britain’s consulate in Jerusalem, barred a dozen Britons including lawmakers and ended British training of Palestinian Authority security forces.
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