The House passed the Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act 237-169, cutting federal funds to colleges that boycott Israel as 33 Democrats defied their leadership and joined Republicans.
The House on Thursday passed legislation blocking federal funds from flowing to colleges and universities that boycott Israel, handing Republicans a decisive win and exposing a widening fracture inside the Democratic Party over the Jewish state.
The Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act cleared the chamber 237 to 169, with 33 Democrats breaking with their leadership to support the measure. Every Republican except two voted yes. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and his top deputies voted no alongside the Republican defectors, Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio.
The vote lands as antisemitic incidents continue to rise on American campuses and as the Democratic Party's progressive wing steps up attacks on members who refuse to fall in line against Israel.
The 33 Democratic votes for the bill mark one of the largest leadership defections of this Congress, and they came with the party's internal civil war over Israel raging in plain view. Jeffries, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Rep. James Clyburn all opposed the legislation, but a bloc of their own caucus broke ranks anyway.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, a frequent critic of his party's leftward drift, co-led the bill against the wishes of his own senior leadership. The measure targets the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, known as BDS, which seeks to isolate Israel economically.
The split follows weeks of escalating tensions inside the Democratic caucus, where far-left groups such as the Democratic Socialists of America have attacked sitting Democrats seen as insufficiently hostile to Israel. The infighting has already produced ugly scenes, including a gay Jewish Democrat running for Congress in California being chased out of a San Francisco march by anti-Israel hecklers who invoked the antisemitic trope of his handlers.
The debate pitted two core Democratic arguments against each other: the party's pro-Israel moderates insisted the bill protects Jewish students, while progressives claimed it tramples the First Amendment.
House Rules Committee Chairwoman Virginia Foxx of North Carolina framed the bill as a moral obligation. They are discriminating against people of the Jewish faith, Foxx said of universities with BDS policies. Now is not the time for talk. It is the time for action.
Gottheimer argued the stakes are life and death for Jewish students. The goal of the BDS movement is the destruction of the democratic State of Israel, America's critical ally in the global fight against terror, he said. At a time when our Jewish students are facing death threats, being physically assaulted, and blocked from going to class simply for who they are, we must do everything possible to ensure they can learn safely.
Progressives pushed back hard. Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, who said he personally opposes BDS, called the bill an attack on the Constitution. The First Amendment right to free speech does not apply only to agreeable speech, Nadler said. No matter how much I may disagree with BDS, and find it strategically stupid and morally repugnant, I will always fight to protect Americans' right to speech with which I disagree.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan went further, calling the bill an attack on free speech and academic freedom in the name of defending what she called a genocidal apartheid state, and warning that a vote for the bill is a betrayal of students who want to save lives.
The legislation prohibits any institution that participates in a non-expressive commercial boycott of Israel from receiving federal funding. It also requires universities that accept federal money to affirm that their students are not unreasonably obstructed from studying abroad in Israel.
Supporters say the measure closes a loophole that let campus BDS campaigns operate under the cover of academic freedom while creating hostile environments for Jewish students. Opponents argue it punishes political speech and could entangle the government in deciding which boycotts are expressive and which are commercial.
The bill now moves to the Senate, where its fate is far from certain, but the House vote already delivered Republicans a potent message for the midterms: even a third of House Democrats could not stomach their leadership's position on Israel.
For Democrats, the vote is another scar in a primary season defined by ideological warfare. With every Democratic vote on Israel now a flashpoint, the party heads into November more divided on the issue than at any point in a generation, and Republicans are eager to remind voters which side of that divide they stand on.
The House passed the Protect Economic and Academic Freedom Act 237-169, cutting federal funds to colleges that boycott Israel as 33 Democrats defied their leadership and joined Republicans.
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