Anti-BDS statutes compel government officials to monitor and enforce whether contractors, employees, or organizations are engaging in boycotts of Israel. This obliges the state to examine private political, economic, and moral choices that are inseparable from a religiously defined state. Such enforcement is not a neutral commercial regulation. It constitutes excessive entanglement because it places the government in the position of policing conscience, compelling speech, and enforcing loyalty to a religious-political project.
The structure of the problem becomes clearer when considered in three interrelated dimensions: religious identity, state power, and ideological justification.
Judea signifies the religious identity framework, the transnational conception of Judaism as a collective polity. In constitutional terms, it is not a state, but it is treated as if it possesses sovereign qualities in political discourse. This recognition alone risks a soft establishment of religion, since one religious community is implicitly elevated to a form of transnational sovereignty.
Israel is the political instantiation of that identity in a state that explicitly defines itself in religious terms. Unlike secular nation-states, Israel is not neutral with respect to religion. Its institutions and policies cannot be separated from their religious grounding. When the United States enacts laws prohibiting boycotts of Israel, it is not merely protecting a foreign ally. It is privileging a religious state above others, which collides directly with the First Amendment's prohibition against establishment.
Zionism provides the ideological justification. It fuses religious identity with colonial expansion, territorial control, and resource acquisition. Western governments, including the United States, have adopted it as a strategic project while laundering its religious particularism through the language of foreign policy. What would otherwise be understood as sectarian favoritism is disguised as ordinary geopolitics.
Anti-BDS laws therefore bind American citizens into complicity with all three dimensions. They coerce participation in a religious identity, they shield a religious state from dissent, and they propagate a colonial ideology. The entanglement is excessive in the precise sense that Lemon v. Kurtzman warned against. Rather than standing apart from religion, the government has built legal machinery that actively enforces this triadic system.
The constitutional defect is fundamental. The government cannot compel citizens to enter into economic transactions with companies or states they oppose. Nor can it strip citizens of their First Amendment rights by criminalizing refusals to participate in what amounts to an officially mandated loyalty ritual to a foreign entity.