Amid a pro-Palestine shift, advocates are looking to roll back state anti-BDS laws. It won’t be easy.
A 2016 protest against a New York State executive order requiring state agencies to divest from companies that boycott Israel.
IN 2015, ILLINOIS WAS ONE OF THE FIRST STATES to pass legislation cracking down on the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement under pressure from pro-Israel groups. Now, as Israel’s popularity plummets, legislators in Springfield are looking to make their state one of the first to repeal its anti-BDS law. Their campaign is one of five nascent state-level efforts to repeal anti-BDS laws.
Since February 2025, lead Illinois house sponsor Abdelnasser Rashid, a progressive and the first Palestinian American legislator in the Illinois General Assembly, and senate sponsor Mike Porfirio, a moderate Navy veteran, have been working to pass a bill striking down the existing law. Advocates for repeal argue that the law, which requires Illinois pension funds to divest from companies that boycott Israel, has not only violated free speech rights and enabled Israeli human rights violations but has also encouraged decisions that inhibit the funds’ performance.
“The defenders of this Illinois law are willing to sacrifice the health of our pensions in pursuit of this goal of shielding Israel from accountability for its actions,” said Rashid. “We owe it to our moral compass and to our retirees to repeal this law that is a stain on Illinois’s history.”
While Illinois activists have long organized against the divestment law, the shifting role of Israel//Palestine in American politics has made a repeal effort newly viable—including in other states. In addition to Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Maryland are fielding repeal campaigns, while Arizona organizers are working to put repeal as a ballot question for voters in 2028.
“Now that there’s a sea change in America on Israel amid growing pushback to Trump’s crackdown on free speech and activism, we’re seeing more grassroots efforts to roll back structural obstacles to advancing Palestinian rights and the right to protest and organize,” said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.
Despite the change in the political winds on Israel, however, the obstacles to these repeal efforts remain significant.
Since 2015, 38 states have put anti-BDS measures on the books. These measures—a mix of laws, executive orders, and resolutions—differ in their details from state to state. Some, like Illinois’s, block state pension funds from investing in companies that boycott Israel; some require companies that contract with the state to sign declarations saying they won’t boycott Israel; some simply condemn BDS. The measures passed quickly with bipartisan support, and have inspired lawmakers to pass similar lawsaimed at squelching divestment efforts against fossil fuel and gun companies.
The Illinois repeal effort has made the most progress so far. The House bill currently has 23 cosponsors, while its companion Senate bill has 14. (Bills require 60 House votes and 30 Senate votes to pass.) Advocates say the Democratic Party’s broader shift on Israel has definitely improved the fortunes of the repeal bill since it was introduced in January 2025.
“We were maligned and laughed at when I first introduced it, with people saying you’re foolish to think that this could happen, and now there is a sense of inevitability,” said Rashid.
Still, the bill spent its entire first year awaiting an assignment to a committee, and this year it failed to advance from the House’s International Relations, Tourism, and Trade Committee. Despite the growing list of cosponsors and a Democratic supermajority in the legislature, “Andrew Herrera, a lobbyist hired by the activist group The Justice Coalition, said there have been “a lot more obstacles to this bill than is normal.”
Opposition to the repeal effort has come from a coalition of pro-Israel Jewish groups spearheaded by Chicago’s Jewish United Fund. A source familiar with the repeal effort said multiple legislators had reported being lobbied by Common Ground Collective, a political advocacy group backed by major Chicago-based Democratic donor Michael Sacks, to oppose the bill. (Neither Sacks nor Common Ground Collective responded to a request for comment.)
Both Rashid and Herrera say they believe they’ll have the votes to pass the repeal if the bill can make it to the floor. “I’m very confident that it’s a matter of when, not if, this policy moves,” said Herrera.
An Illinois repeal could help build momentum for other state efforts, including in neighboring Wisconsin, where in March progressive Democrats introduced a bill to repeal a state law that bars state contractors from boycotting Israel.
The Wisconsin bill failed to advance in the Republican-controlled legislature and garnered the support of only 11 Democrats. Ryan Clancy, a Democratic state assemblymember from Milwaukee who supports repeal, said the Democrats who didn’t support the bill were afraid of facing primary challengers backed by local pro-Israel donors.
Passing the law would also need an aligned governor to sign the repeal bill. The Republican candidate for governor, Tom Tiffany, is endorsed by Donald Trump and staunchly pro-Israel. But David Crowley, his Democratic opponent (who narrowly defeated democratic socialist representative Francesca Hong this month), told Jewish Currents he would look closely at Wisconsin’s anti-BDS bill.
“I believe antisemitism should be confronted clearly and consistently, but government must be very careful not to infringe on constitutionally protected free speech and political expression,” Crowley said in a statement.
In Arizona, meanwhile, organizers are trying a different tack: a ballot initiative, launched in April, to repeal a 2016 law requiring state contractors to submit a written pledge certifying they won’t boycott Israel. Eva Putzova, campaign lead for the Arizona Right to Dissent coalition, says the advantage of this approach is that, if successful, it will be harder for legislators to overturn in the future. “A legislative fix is not as good as a fix through a ballot measure in Arizona. We have the Voter Protection Act, so if you pass a law through the ballot initiative process, then the legislators cannot repeal the law,” she said.
The campaign plans to start collecting the necessary signatures—a number likely to be over 200,000—in the fall of 2027, in order to put a question on the ballot in 2028. The question will ask all Arizonans not only whether to repeal the law but also to affirm the right to boycott.
The Arizona effort comes after a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union challenging the state’s anti-BDS law on First Amendment grounds fizzled out. Though a federal court initially ruled in favor of the ACLU and blocked the law, state legislators quickly tweaked the law to apply only to larger contracts, making the challenge moot. (A similar process played out in multiple other states where the law was challenged.)
“The legislators moved the goalposts,” said Putzova. “So we came to the conclusion that the fix is not legal. It must be political.”