What to Ask Your Michigan State Legislature Candidates About Ending Apartheid and Genocide in Palestine
Trade missions, pension funds, and anti-boycott laws show Lansing has more leverage than you might think.
If you’re like most people, a state legislator’s seat probably isn’t the first place you’d look for anything connected to Israel and Palestine. That’s a reasonable instinct. The State Department negotiates with foreign governments. Foreign policy reads as federal business by default, and a state representative or state senator can lean on that default without ever having to argue for it.
Michigan’s record over the last three decades shows gaping holes in that instinct when under even slight scrutiny. State lawmakers have signed off on trade missions, barred contractors from boycotts, appropriated money to build ties with Israel’s tech and defense sector, and once, forty years ago, tried to use the state’s pension fund as leverage against a different country’s apartheid system.
None of that required setting foreign policy. It required a vote, sponsorship, or signature from someone holding exactly the kind of seat that’s on the ballot this cycle.
A Decades-Long Tradition
The tradition goes back further than any one legislator’s trip. Gov. John Engler flew to Israel on a trade mission in 1997 (Detroit Free Press, May 19, 1997), arriving on a private jet loaned by Detroit Pistons owner William Davidson, to meet Jerusalem’s mayor and push Michigan-Israel trade ties. In 2008, Gov. Jennifer Granholm went further than a courtesy visit, signing a formal Joint Declaration of Strategic Cooperation with Israel’s deputy prime minister, making Michigan the first US state to sign a water-technology partnership agreement with the country, on the same trip that took her delegation to meet with a Michigan defense contractor’s Israeli venture partners. Gov. Rick Snyder took his own trade mission in 2013, meeting Netanyahu one-on-one and signing a letter of intent with Israel’s economy minister. When Gov. Whitmer went in 2019, she called it “the decades-long tradition of Michigan governors traveling to Israel to deepen our relationship.”
Rank-and-file legislators have a parallel version. In 2005, eight members of the Michigan Legislature spent six days touring Israel on a trip organized by the Jewish Community Council of Metropolitan Detroit, built around “forging stronger economic ties between Michigan and Israel” and studying the country’s “homeland security” and “anti-terror” programs. Sylvia Santana took what she called “an annual trip offered to state lawmakers to learn more about Michigan’s relationship with Israel” in 2023 and had to publicly apologize to her Dearborn-area constituents once word got out. In September 2025, two more Michigan legislators went on the biggest version of this trip yet: Rep. Jaime Greene and Rep. Noah Arbit both joined roughly 250 state legislators from all 50 states flown to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for a conference called “50 States One Israel,” with the Israeli government covering airfare, lodging, and meals in full. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar didn’t treat the gathering as a courtesy visit either, telling the delegation directly to go home and get to work: “Instead of boycotting Israel, promote engagement with Israel. Instead of divesting from Israel, promote investments in Israel.”
Cybersecurity cooperation has followed the same track as trade and tourism. In December 2019, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson joined ten other secretaries of state on a trip sponsored by Project Interchange, an American Jewish Committee institute, framed around examining Israeli cybersecurity practices for election administration (The Arab American News, Dec. 21, 2019). Local Arab American leaders read the visit differently at the time. Attorney Huwaida Arraf said flatly that “Michiganders do not want their officials bringing home mass surveillance and militarized policing,” and Arab American Civil Rights Chairman Nasser Beydoun and activist Amer Zahr both raised the same concern: that a state importing Israeli security expertise was importing a surveillance and policing model along with it.
Sitting in that Lansing chair evidently comes with more of a role in this question than the chair’s occupants like to admit.
Boycotting Apartheid
In 1987, state Reps. Perry Bullard and Virgil Smith introduced bills, with matching legislation from Sens. Jackie Vaughn and Dan DeGrow, to pull roughly $2 billion in state pension money out of companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. The bills failed that session, the way similar divestment bills had failed every year since 1977. But the idea behind them, using the state’s pension money as leverage against a foreign government’s human rights record, isn’t something imported into this fight from outside. Michigan’s legislature built that tool and tried repeatedly to use it, for a cause the state now treats as obviously righteous in hindsight.
Israel and the apartheid regime in South Africa were allies, and not quietly. Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres met South African Defence Minister P.W. Botha in 1975 and, according to documents a researcher later pulled from South African archives, offered to sell Pretoria nuclear warheads “in three sizes”. A formal defense cooperation agreement followed, with a clause stating that the agreement’s existence had to stay secret. Two years later, in 1977, Israel traded 30 grams of tritium for 50 tons of South African uranium, material both countries needed for weapons work neither would admit to pursuing. When a US satellite detected a mysterious double flash over the South Atlantic in 1979, the Vela Incident, the leading explanation among nuclear researchers has long been a joint Israeli-South African test.
The military relationship went well past nuclear cooperation. Israel helped South Africa dodge the UN’s 1977 mandatory arms embargo by sending Lavi project technicians to upgrade South Africa’s aging Mirage fighters, and by licensing the South African navy to build patrol boats and missile corvettes based on Israeli designs. South Africa’s Scorpion missile was a licensed copy of Israel’s Gabriel. When South African Prime Minister John Vorster, a man interned during World War II for pro-Nazi sympathies, visited Israel in 1976, it was only the third trip outside South Africa he’d taken as prime minister, and it produced a wide-ranging pact covering coal, steel, military hardware, and further nuclear collaboration. The two countries had already upgraded their diplomatic missions to full embassy status in 1974. The ANC, watching all of this from exile, called the Vorster visit the high point of a cooperation that had been building for years.
None of that history is what the 1987 Michigan bills were about directly. But it’s the backdrop that made pension divestment from South Africa the obvious model for BDS advocates to reach for decades later. The two governments weren’t separate case studies in how states can commit human rights abuses. For a stretch of the Cold War, they were each other’s most reliable weapons supplier and diplomatic partner, bound together by, among other things, a shared experience of international isolation and arms embargoes. When BDS organizers point to the 1987 Michigan bills as precedent, they’re pointing at a state legislature that once tried to use financial pressure against one half of an alliance the other half was still benefiting from.
The comparison isn’t only a matter of who armed whom, either. It comes from people who lived through apartheid firsthand and later saw the West Bank and Gaza for themselves. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who spent his life fighting apartheid from inside it, wrote after his own visits that what he saw in the occupied territories, the checkpoints, the house demolitions, the confiscation of land for Jewish-only settlements, the confinement of Palestinians to fragmented pockets of territory, reminded him directly of the Bantustans his own government had carved out for Black South Africans. He went further than analogy, writing in 2012 that in some respects the situation was worse than what apartheid ideologues in South Africa had built.
Denis Goldberg, who was tried alongside Nelson Mandela as a member of the ANC’s armed wing and spent 22 years in prison for it, made the same comparison in his own words before his death. Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s foreign minister, put the government’s position plainly in 2022: “The Palestinian narrative evokes experiences of South Africa’s own history of racial segregation and oppression.” That conviction is why South Africa’s government, not just its activists, brought the genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice in 2024, a move South African commentators described as a cathartic moment for ordinary South Africans who’d lived through apartheid’s afterlife and heard their own history described back to them in the testimony.
Same Tool, Opposite Direction
“Pension divestment and Israel” can mean two opposite things depending on who’s using the phrase. The 1987 bills would have divested Michigan’s money away from companies profiting off apartheid, which is the same mechanism BDS supporters want applied today to companies doing business in the occupied Palestinian territories. What most state laws on the books right now actually do runs the other way: they divest from, and blacklist, companies that boycott Israel. The target is the boycotter, not the boycotted. They control is where a state’s investment dollars go, and they steer those dollars away from companies seen as insufficiently supportive of Israel, not away from Israel itself.
Michigan is one of at least 27 states that passed a law like this within a four-year stretch, according to a Center for Public Integrity investigation into where the bills came from. They didn’t come from 27 legislatures independently landing on the same idea. They came from model legislation, drafted by pro-Israel advocacy groups and copied, sometimes almost word for word, from one statehouse to the next. Drop Site News has reported on a newer Israel-backed nonprofit built specifically to keep state lawmakers supplied with pre-written bills like this, on issues well beyond boycotts.
Public Acts 525 and 527, passed in 2016 and signed into law by Gov. Snyder in January 2017, require any business contracting with the state, for supplies, IT work, or construction on state property, to certify in writing that it isn’t boycotting Israel and won’t for the life of the contract. Michigan was the fifteenth state to pass a law like it. The Jewish Community Relations Council’s executive director called it proof that “the State of Michigan stands with Israel,” and the pro-Israel group StandWithUs said at the time that it protected tens of millions of dollars a year in state trade with Israeli entities.
There’s also a live appropriations question every budget cycle. The Michigan Israel Business Accelerator has pulled in millions of public dollars through the Michigan Economic Development Corporation since 2018, and this past February it asked the legislature for another $1 million through a Legislatively Directed Spending Item, the earmark process where one lawmaker attaches their name to a specific request. A single 2023 mobility-sector trip to Israel’s EcoMotion conference cost Michigan taxpayers nearly $65,000 in lodging, flights, sponsorship, and booth costs, according to records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Questions Worth Putting to Any Michigan House or Senate Candidate This Year
A state legislator doesn’t set foreign policy. But Michigan’s statute books, budget lines, and travel schedules tell a different story than the one candidates keep repeating. A Michigan legislator’s vote decides whether a contractor has to sign away its position on a foreign boycott before it can fix a state building. A legislator’s sponsorship decides whether a nonprofit gets another million dollars in state money to deepen ties with a foreign country’s tech and defense sector. A legislator’s silence decides whether an untested speech restriction stays on the books for another decade unchallenged. None of it runs through the State Department. It just takes someone willing to admit they’re choosing not to pull levers already sitting in front of them, instead of pretending the levers don’t exist.
1. Would you support repealing or amending Michigan’s anti-boycott certification law?
Public Acts 525 and 527 require any business contracting with the state, for supplies, IT, or construction on state property, to certify in writing that it won’t boycott Israel for the life of the contract. This got voted into law once already, and it can get voted out. Ask whether the candidate would keep it, repeal it, or force the same legal test Arkansas has been fighting over since 2019.
2. Would you sponsor or block state economic development money going to Israeli-linked companies?
The Michigan Israel Business Accelerator has taken in millions through the MEDC since 2018 and asked for another $1 million earmark this February. A legislator can sponsor that request, refuse to sponsor it, or vote the underlying budget line up or down.
3. Should Michigan’s pension system reward or penalize companies over their conduct in Israel and the occupied territories?
Get the direction straight before asking this one, since it’s easy to garble. In 1987 Michigan legislators tried to divest state pension money out of companies doing business with apartheid South Africa. What most state laws elsewhere do now runs the opposite way, divesting from companies that boycott Israel rather than from companies operating in the occupied territories. Michigan doesn’t have a settled law doing either. Ask which direction, if any, a candidate would take the state’s pension leverage, and whether they think what Michigan already did to South Africa is a fair comparison to what BDS is asking for now.
4. Have you taken, or would you take, a state-sponsored or advocacy-sponsored trip to Israel?
This goes back three governors and at least two decades of rank-and-file travel. A legislator who takes a trip like this is accepting something specific from a foreign government. Ask whether the candidate has gone, would go, and what they think comes attached to the invitation.
5. Would you have sponsored House Resolution 223?
State Reps. Wegela, Farhat, and Byrnes introduced this resolution in November, calling on Michigan’s congressional delegation to halt arms sales to Israel and rush aid into Gaza. It carries no legal weight and had no realistic path through a Republican-controlled chamber. It’s still a vote with sponsors attached to it. Ask whether the candidate would have signed on, and if not, what specifically about it they’d have objected to.
6. Would you refuse money from Israel-aligned PACs and organizations, and would you say so publicly if an outside group spent against your opponent on your behalf?
This is a personal commitment a candidate can make regardless of whether anyone’s currently offering that money down-ballot.
The thing to listen for across all these questions isn’t whether a candidate supports or opposes any particular Israeli policy. It’s whether they answer the specific mechanism you asked about or reach for something broader and safer instead, a value everyone already shares about surveillance or antisemitism or Islamophobia, rather than a yes or no on the actual lever sitting in front of them. The office comes with real levers attached whether a candidate names them or not.