Palestinian-American contractor pushes back against Texas anti-BDS law

A Palestinian-owned engineering and contracting firm is challenging a law which bars the state of Texas from working with companies partaking in the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction (BDS) Israel.

A&R Engineering and Testing Inc. has filed a lawsuit at the United States district court in Houston, arguing Texas’ anti-boycott law is an “unconstitutional” violation of the right to Free Speech guaranteed by the US Constitution’s First Amendment.

Rasmy - ‘Russ’ - Hassouna, owner of A&R, is a Palestinian-American who has worked with the city of Houston for more than 17 years, accumulating more than $2 million in government engineering contracts during this time. 

However, according to the complaint, Hassouna refused to sign a recent renewal contract which demanded compliance to Texas’s anti-BDS laws. In the complain, Hassouna argues: “Israel is an occupier of my homeland and it is an Apartheid State. It is my right and duty to boycott Israel and any products of Israel. This policy is against my constitutional right and against International Law. I demand that you take the paragraph about Israel off from the contract.”

The City of Houston and the press office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is named in the suit, has not yet responded.

Texas is one of 25 states to pass laws banning or curtailing BDS, a non-violent, grassroots movement modelled on the campaign to boycott South African apartheid, which critics have argued “criminalises free speech”. In recent years, however, federal courts have ruled these laws unconstitutional. 

This is not the first time anti-BDS measures have been challenged in Texas, which has become a particularly heated battleground over this issue. In 2019, The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which filed the lawsuit on Hassouna’s behalf, won a landmark victory in a similar suit on behalf of Bahia Amawi, the Texas speech language pathologist who lost her job because she refused to sign a “No Boycott of Israel” clause. 

Elsewhere, CAIR’s Georgia chapter also won a lawsuit on behalf of Abby Martin, a journalist barred from Georgia Southern University after she refused to pledge she would not boycott Israel.

In a news conference on Monday, CAIR senior litigator Gadeir Abbas expressed confidence in winning a similar outcome for A&R, arguing the Texas law demands “allegiance to Israel”, and that such laws “have no place in Houston’s contracts with Texans”.