Lawmakers seek to reverse Illinois law penalizing companies that boycott
Israel
[May 17, 2025]
By Simon Carr, Sonya Dymova
SPRINGFIELD — A growing number of state lawmakers are moving to repeal a
2015 Illinois law penalizing companies that boycott Israel to protest
its policies toward Palestinians.
Amid concerns about Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, lawmakers in
Springfield supporting human rights for Palestinians have increasingly
signed on to legislation opposing the decade-old anti-boycott law. But
so far, these bills have stalled.
Illinois’ 2015 law prohibits state pension funds from investing in
companies engaging in the Boycott, Divest, Sanction, or BDS, movement
against Israel, making Illinois the first U.S. state to enact such
legislation, with dozens of other states following suit. The measure,
signed into law by Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican, was modeled after
similar post-9/11 measures restricting Illinois’ pension funds from
investment in companies that engage in business with the governments of
Iran and Sudan.
When boycotting Israel became grounds for blacklisting, Illinois
lawmakers established the Illinois Investment Policy Board, tasked with
investigating companies’ investment choices. Opponents of the laws have
warned they curtail free speech. Israel is the only country for which
boycotting is penalized in Illinois by the board.
To repeal this policy, Rep. Abdelnasser Rashid, D-Bridgeview, introduced
House Bill 2723, and Sen. Mike Porfirio, D-Bridgeview, introduced Senate
Bill 2462 earlier this year. Since then, some 22 co-sponsors were added
in the House and Senate, while two of those later had their names
removed.
“This is about the right for people to advocate for what they believe —
in this particular case, for human rights advocacy — without the state
telling you what you have to believe and how you have to act,” said
Rashid, the first Palestinian-American to serve in the Illinois House of
Representatives. “It is a matter of making sure that Illinois is on the
right side of history — not participating in the oppression of the
Palestinian people – but it is also about making sure the Illinoisans
and companies that do business in Illinois are not being forced and
bullied and retaliated against because they chose to stand for human
rights.”
Thirty companies are currently on the Illinois Investment Policy Board’s
prohibited entity list for boycotting Israel.
In 2021, Unilever, for example, was added to that list after its
subsidiary — ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s — announced it would stop
selling its products in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as defined
by the United Nations. While remaining a supporter of Israel, the
company said it did not support “an internationally recognised illegal
occupation.”
Chicago-based investment firm Morningstar narrowly avoided state
divestment in 2022, when the Illinois Investment Policy Board accused
the firm’s subsidiary, Sustainalytics, of having an anti-Israel bias.
The company then commissioned an independent report that found evidence
of anti-Israel bias in Morningstar’s standalone product, Human Rights
Radar. Morningstar agreed to accept a series of recommendations,
including discontinuing the Human Rights Radar and no longer taking
input from the United Nations Human Rights Council, in order to avoid
state divestment.
Wavering support
While President Trump-supporting Republicans and right-wing activists
rail against a bipartisan national bill that would toughen penalties for
boycotting Israel’s government, Illinois’ Democratic supermajority
legislature appears hesitant to put an end to its 2015 anti-boycott law,
which passed unanimously in both houses.
Rashid’s and Porfirio’s bills have stalled in committee despite the
initial support from about one-fifth of the Democratic caucus, including
the leaders of the Latino, Black and Progressive caucuses.
Thousands of bills, the vast majority of those proposed, get stuck in
the Rules Committee every year for various reasons. In HB 2723’s case,
the holdup can be attributed in part to the political costs of
supporting the bill, advocates said.
Sen. Napoleon Harris, D-Harvey, was listed as a cosponsor on March 20,
and Sen. Adriane Johnson, D-Buffalo Grove, signed onto the bill on April
2, but both had their names removed on April 8. Neither senator
responded to a request for comment on their reasoning.
Porfirio, the Senate bill’s chief sponsor, and its chief cosponsors —
Karina Villa, D-West Chicago; Graciela Guzmán, D-Chicago, and Rachel
Ventura, D-Joliet — all declined or failed to respond to requests for
comment.
“Even though it had quite an impressive list of sponsors and cosponsors,
it’s a controversial piece of legislation that is likely to engender a
lot of debate that most legislators don’t want to vote on, because they
either have Jewish or Palestinian constituents, or both,” said Dick
Simpson, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago
and former Chicago alderman. “Why should they vote on something that
isn’t going to pass and then cause some constituents to be mad at them?”
But Deanna Othman, member of the Chicago chapter of American Muslims for
Palestine, said HB 2723 is urgent, citing both a humanitarian crisis and
a crisis of free speech.
“Unfortunately, it’s more relevant now than ever, because we’ve seen all
of the crackdown on student protesters and people who engage in boycott
and people who are just voicing their First Amendment rights,” Othman
said. “If I cannot stand up for the rights of my fellow Palestinians,
whose rights can I stand up for?”
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Students at DePaul University’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment face
counterprotesters in May 2024. This encampment was one of at least
130 similar campus protests last year, which highlighted concerns
that Israel was engaging in human rights violations. (Medill
Illinois News Bureau photo/ Simon Carr)
‘It’s impossible to tell if this bill will ever pass’
Activists say they are hopeful a repeal of the anti-BDS law will pass in
2026 if it continues to stall this year. But it remains an uphill
battle, even as they point to a steady decrease in American popular
support for Israel.
About 53% of Americans express an unfavorable opinion of Israel,
according to a Pew Research Center study conducted last month. This is
an increase from March 2022, when that figure was 42%.
The survey found the share of Americans with little or no trust in
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “do the right thing for
global affairs” increased significantly from 2023 to 2024. Since Oct. 7,
over 52,000 people in Gaza have been killed in Israeli attacks,
according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza. An estimated
1,200 people were killed in Israel during the Hamas’s attacks on Oct. 7,
2023, and around 250 Israelis were taken hostage.
The pro-Israel, pro-peace advocacy group J Street does not oppose
boycott initiatives “that explicitly support a two-state solution and
recognize Israel’s right to exist,” according to a statement of its
policies. “It is critical to maintain the distinction between boycott
efforts that work against the interests of Israel, and initiatives which
are limited to opposing the occupation. We neither oppose nor call for
these initiatives,” the group said in a statement.
But J Street does oppose the broader Global BDS Movement, which
advocates for three tenets: That Israel should stop policing the border
on and occupying legally Palestinian land, that Arab-Palestinian
citizens of Israel should have full equality with Jewish citizens and
that Palestinians be allowed to return to their homes, as stipulated in
UN Resolution 194.
Lesley Williams, an activist with Evanston Ceasefire who has been
lobbying to repeal Illinois’ anti-BDS law, said the three tenets don’t
mean “Israel needs to stop existing.”
“That doesn’t mean that non-Palestinians should be forced to leave
Israel,” she said. “It just says the Palestinians should have equal
rights in that territory and that Israel should be following United
Nations resolutions.”
The original sponsor of the 2015 anti-BDS law in the House, then Rep.
(now Sen.) Sara Feigenholtz, D-Chicago, declined several requests for
comment. However, when a 2022 Crain’s Chicago Business op-ed criticized
Feigenholtz’s legislation, arguing it was “raising the specter of
McCarthy-like scrutiny.” Feigenholtz issued a statement defending her
law.
“Israel is the singular democracy in the Middle East that has
historically been a consistent ally to the United States,” Feigenholtz
said at the time. “Boycotts of Israel, like Ben & Jerry’s/Unilever, are
intended to harm and weaken Israel.” She added, “No one’s free speech is
curtailed.”
Ben and Jerry’s co-founders Bennett Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who no
longer run the company, denied the boycott was anti-Israel or
antisemitic in a 2021 op-ed. They said it was merely a rejection of
Israeli policy, and that Ben and Jerry’s was in fact advancing justice
and human rights, both “core tenets of Judaism.”
Given the controversy surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian divide, many
political obstacles to these current bills passing will probably remain
next year. Politicians are less likely to discuss controversial issues
like the BDS movement when there’s a supermajority of one party — in
Illinois’ case, Democrats — for fear of factionalizing, said Ryan Burge,
a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University.
Even if a repeal of the anti-BDS law makes it through the legislature,
Gov. JB Pritzker may still be an obstacle, Burge added.
“Pritzker is going to try to run for president in 2028, and he doesn’t
want anything to happen in the GA that could be used as an albatross on
his neck when he runs for the primary in a couple years,” Burge said.
Should anti-BDS legislation reach Pritzker’s desk, “The Governor will
carefully review this piece of legislation,” the governor’s press
secretary, Alex Gough, said in an email.
“It’s impossible to tell if this bill will ever pass, and the reason for
that is it’s impossible to predict where the Israeli and Palestinian war
will be next year,” Simpson said. “I don’t know, if Israel does carry
through on its threats to move all the Palestinians out of Gaza and to
permanently take control, that might provide enough anger to cause it to
pass. But it is just predicting.”
Simon Carr and Sonya Dymova are students in
journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of
Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, and are
fellows in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership
with Capitol News Illinois.
Capitol News Illinois is
a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state
government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is
funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R.
McCormick Foundation.
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