Illinois voters approve proposals objecting to state law against Israel boycotts

JTA — Voters in eight municipalities in Illinois approved ballot measures last week registering formal objections to the state’s law barring state pension investments in companies that boycott Israel.

The ballot measures will have no effect on state policy. But pro-Palestinian groups are celebrating the wins as demonstrations of shifting public opinion against the law, first signed in 2015 to oppose the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement against Israel.

The village of Oak Park and the townships of Champaign, Cunningham, DuPage, Kickapoo, Medina, Normal, and Peoria all approved similarly worded ballot measures that urge the state to repeal its anti-BDS law or support specific state legislation that would do so. According to unofficial tallies, 65 percent of voters in Oak Park, a Chicago suburb whose local Jewish population mounted a sustained objection to the referendum, approved the measure there.

Groups including the Jewish United Fund, Chicago’s Jewish federation, had campaigned against the ballot measure. The Illinois law, championed by JUF when it was first passed, was the first of what have become dozens of state anti-BDS laws in the country. First Amendment groups have challenged the laws.

“We would have much preferred a victory,” Dan Goldwin, chief public affairs officer for JUF, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Monday. Yet Goldwin pointed out that Oak Park voters had approved the measure by smaller margins than their votes for top Democratic candidates, including Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and former presidential candidate Kamala Harris in 2024.

“Once people began to be exposed to the meaning of what the referendum was about, they moved against it. We just didn’t have enough time,” he said.

Some members of the Oak Park opposition had engaged in a drawn-out fight over the eligibility of the signatures the ballot measure activists had gathered. That time, Goldwin theorized, “was probably time better spent convincing people to vote against it.”

Separately, voters in the state’s Bloomington Township approved a measure stating that the federal government should “ban the transfer of weapons to any country that is a dictatorship, apartheid state or major violator of human rights.”

The ballot language did not mention Israel, but pro-Palestinian activists have long maintained that Israel is guilty of apartheid and that the US should halt weapons sales to the country.

Local Jewish figures have said the campaign troubled them.

“It felt like it was a local chapter of a global movement to destroy the world’s only Jewish state, and I felt it personally and acutely,” Rabbi Adir Glick of Conservative Temple Har Zion in River Forest, which borders Oak Park, told the Wednesday Journal of Oak Park and River Forest about the campaign. “I know people who lost friendships in the last few months, and difficult moments with neighbors and colleagues, but it also galvanized our Jewish community.”

Goldwin said the measures’ passage would not change JUF’s own strategy opposing the repeal of the anti-BDS law at the state level. He noted that ballot measure activists, with the exception of Oak Park, largely didn’t target municipalities with large Jewish communities. In his view, those seeking the repeal of the law “are still a significant minority.”

The BDS movement had a more significant policy victory on election night with the passage of a binding ballot referendum in Providence, Rhode Island, to divest that city from “foreign countries conducting ethnic cleansing, apartheid, illegal military occupation, or genocide.” Proponents and opponents of the measure alike have said they believe the language and parameters of the question will include Israel.

Israel adamantly denies accusations of apartheid, pointing to the equal rights that Arab citizens within Israel have, and rejects claims of genocide in Gaza during the war that started with the Hamas-led October 7, 2023, onslaught. It blames Hamas for fighting within civilian population centers.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.