CAIRO (Dispatches) – The U.S.
Department of Commerce has announced plans to ramp up enforcement of anti-boycott laws, in an attempt to exert pressure on the Arab League to normalize relations with the Zionist regime.
The new policy, announced by the department on Thursday, would increase fines against U.S. companies boycotting the regime, and also broaden its focus on foreign subsidiaries of American companies.
The policy builds on a U.S. law passed in 1979, which states American companies and individuals will face criminal and civil penalties for participating in the Arab League’s longstanding position to boycott the Tel Aviv regime.
Matthew Axelrod, who oversees anti-boycott enforcement at the Department of Commerce, uncovered the new policy in a memo to department staff and at an event at the American Jewish Committee’s Washington office.
“I want to ensure that we in the Commerce Department are doing what we can to have the strongest possible anti-boycott enforcement program,” he said.
Axelrod went on to say that the new policy could help create pressure on countries that have yet to normalize relations with the Zionist regime, including Syria and Iraq, which he claimed were “moving in the wrong direction.”
“Our Office of Antiboycott Compliance now has enhanced tools to help deter violations of our anti-boycott rules, and where deterrence proves unsuccessful, it now has enhanced tools to punish the violators,” he said.
The policy changes come two years after the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco became the first Arab countries in decades to break long-standing consensus in the Arab world and normalize relations with the Zionist regime in a deal brokered by former U.S. president Donald Trump.
Arab countries had long held the position that normalization with the Tel Aviv regime would come only after its withdrawal from illegally occupied Palestinian territories.
Lawmakers in the U.S. are also working to push forward laws that would criminalize the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
More than 30 U.S. states already have passed their own versions of legislation that effectively forces individuals and companies contracted with the state to sign a pledge not to boycott the Zionist regime.