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She Wouldn’t Promise Not to Boycott Israel, So a Texas School District Stopped Paying Her

Bahia Amawi’s contract as a speech pathologist in Texas was not renewed this year.

For nearly a decade, Bahia Amawi worked as a speech pathologist and therapist for children in the Pflugerville Independent School District, which includes schools in Austin.

She was, to her knowledge, the only certified speech pathologist working for the district who spoke Arabic, which made her indispensable to children whose first language was Arabic. She had renewed her contract annually without incident.

But this year, her contract came with an addendum: She was asked to affirm that she would not boycott Israel during the term of the contract.

Ms. Amawi, 46, a Palestinian-American mother of four who has relatives in the occupied West Bank, said she did not consider herself an activist but avoided buying products from Israel. “This is a personal choice,” she said. “I’m always aware of the products and where they come from. It’s just a habit of mine that when I purchase anything, I always like to see where it’s made.”

So she didn’t sign, and her contract wasn’t renewed. Now, Ms. Amawi is suing the school district and Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, in a case that has gained widespread attention.

In the culture wars over free speech, battles over the right to boycott Israel are among the most contentious. It’s an international issue, tangled up in United States politics and wrestled over at the state level — and not just in Texas. Cases like Ms. Amawi’s are being litigated in several states.

“The policy preferences of a foreign country are taking precedence over the needs of Bahia’s students, who have benefited from her knowledge and her fluency in multiple languages,” said Gadeir Abbas, a lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations who is representing Ms. Amawi.

“Bahia’s decision to buy this kind of hummus and not that kind of hummus is her decision,” he added, “and the Constitution protects it.”

In response to a request for comment on the lawsuit, a spokeswoman for the Pflugerville school district said it was “at the mercy of the state,” and Mr. Paxton’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

The lawsuit is part of a broader debate over efforts to boycott, divest investments from, and place sanctions on Israel — a movement known as B.D.S. Some supporters see the movement as a way to pressure Israel to end the occupation of the West Bank, provide full equality under the law to Palestinian citizens of Israel and grant a right of return to Palestinian refugees. But many opponents consider the movement anti-Semitic and see it as calling for the destruction of Israel.

“Anti-Israel policies are anti-Texas policies, and we will not tolerate such actions against an important ally,” Gov. Greg Abbott said in a statement when he signed the bill into law in May 2017.

The bill said that a government entity could not enter into a contract with a company unless that company verified that it would not boycott Israel during the term of the contract. “Company” was defined to include for-profit sole-proprietorships.

Similar laws have been passed in more than a dozen states over the past four years.

“I do think there’s been a coordinated push around this, and you can tell that because many of the laws are virtually identical, they include very similar legislative findings, and they’re all passed within a short time period,” said Brian Hauss, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.

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A demonstration in New York City in 2016.Credit...Erik McGregor/Pacific Press, via LightRocket, via Getty Images

The A.C.L.U. does not take a public position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it has been challenging the state laws, one by one, on the basis of free speech — and with lawsuits that are very similar to Ms. Amawi’s.

In Kansas, for example, the A.C.L.U. represented another education contractor who lost work after refusing to promise that she would not participate in a boycott of Israel. The suit led to a federal injunction in January, blocking the law’s enforcement. In June, the A.C.L.U. agreed to dismiss the suit after state legislators narrowed the scope of the legislation so that it applied only to companies, not to individuals.

In Arizona, the A.C.L.U. represented a lawyer who had a state contract to work with incarcerated people, and who did not want his purchases to support companies linked to Israel. In September, a federal court blocked the enforcement of that state’s law, too.

A parallel debate is happening at the federal level, where congressional lawmakers from both sides of the aisle are considering legislation that would keep American companies from participating in boycotts — primarily against Israel — that are being carried out by international organizations.

In the meantime, the state-level battles continue. This month, another lawsuit was filed in Arkansas, where the A.C.L.U. is representing The Arkansas Times, a newspaper that says the state’s anti-B.D.S. law is unconstitutional. And on Tuesday, the A.C.L.U. filed a lawsuit in Texas (separate from Ms. Amawi’s) on behalf of four people who were affected by the law there.

“I hope the courts are going to continue standing up for Americans’ First Amendment rights, but I also hope legislators will start standing up for those rights as well,” Mr. Hauss said. “It takes a lot of resources to bring these lawsuits in every state, and I think the principles are pretty clearly established at this point.”

Joel Schwitzer, the regional director of the American Jewish Committee in Dallas, which supported the bill’s passage in Texas last year, said the law was appropriate because the B.D.S. movement threatens the very existence of Israel, and because the law does not violate the United States Constitution.

“You absolutely have a First Amendment right to free speech, but there is no absolute right to do business with the State of Texas,” he said. “If a company chooses to boycott Israel, then the State of Texas chooses not to do business with you.”

But he added that the law was misapplied in the case of Ms. Amawi because she is an individual who can avoid Israeli products without affecting her work. “If her choice is to boycott Israel, that’s her right and it doesn’t have any bearing on her ability to provide speech pathology,” he said.

Phil King, a Texas state representative who wrote the bill there, said in an emailed statement that the law did not infringe on anyone’s right to criticize or boycott Israel.

“Our state law narrowly regulates against state and local government involvement in discriminatory commercial activity,” added Mr. King, a Republican. “It does so in order to defend hundreds of millions of dollars in exports and employment interests that depend upon trade with Israel.”

Officials who support anti-B.D.S. laws often cite trade with Israel as a motivating factor. Last year, according to data from the International Trade Administration, Texas’ exports to Israel were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Imports exceeded $1 billion. But in terms of total value of trade, Israel is outranked by dozens of other countries including Canada, Mexico, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

The Texas law has invited scrutiny before. National Public Radio reported that last year in Dickinson, a city on the outskirts of Houston, some people applying for repair grants after Hurricane Harvey had to sign a form saying that they would “not boycott Israel during the term of this agreement.” That was a misinterpretation of the law, Mr. King, the state representative, said at the time.

In his statement on Tuesday, Mr. King said that he would soon file “a simple bill to alleviate any confusion” about the law, which was always intended to “address companies involved in discriminatory commercial activity,” though he did not elaborate.

Ms. Amawi said she would like to see the law taken off the books altogether. “It’s unconstitutional and it’s un-American,” she said. “I want to be able to overturn it because it really affects everyone, not just me.”

Emily Cochrane and Matthew Haag contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Therapist Loses Job in Israel Boycott Debate. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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