The Quiet Success of the Israel Divestment Motion

August 9, 2024

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Grassroots efforts to divest native U.S. taxpayer {dollars} from Israel over its ongoing genocide of Palestinians are gaining steam.

The USA has traditionally supplied a whole bunch of billions of {dollars} in international support to Israel. The circulate of taxpayer funds to Israel’s army has solely elevated since Israeli forces launched an assault on Gaza in October 2023, through which as many as 186,000 Palestinians have been killed, in accordance with an estimate printed in The Lancet in July 2024.

Past the federal {dollars} funding the continuing assault on Gaza, there are additionally investments made on the state and municipal ranges to assist Israel’s violence in opposition to Palestinians. “The ethnic cleaning and horrors that we’re witnessing being carried out by the Israeli authorities are deeply entangled in materials assist from the USA, and that occurs on a number of ranges,” says Jay Saper, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in New York Metropolis.

As calls for for Palestinian liberation develop louder than ever earlier than in defiance of Israel’s persevering with assaults on the occupied nation and its individuals, organizers with JVP and different teams crucial of U.S. funding for Israel have ramped up efforts focusing on this assist in their very own backyards. These efforts embrace the Not on Our Dime! marketing campaign in New York state, which goals to finish subsidies for New York–registered charitable organizations that fundraise to assist the Israeli army and violent settler teams, and the Break the Bonds marketing campaign, a JVP-led initiative that seeds and helps native efforts to demand divestment from Israel Bonds nationwide.

In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, residence to Cleveland, Mohammed Faraj works with the Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Neighborhood on an area effort related to JVP’s Break the Bonds marketing campaign. He says the coalition’s “No New Bonds” marketing campaign has grown stronger and extra organized since Israel launched its newest assault on Gaza, and coalition companions have made a concerted effort to achieve native lawmakers. “After October, there was only a feeling of wanting to speak to, actually, anyone who would pay attention,” explains Faraj. “We realized how inaccessible our federal legislators are and have been, [but] our native political leaders are right here, and so they’re accessible.”

Not solely are state and native lawmakers extra accessible to constituents than federal lawmakers, however native funding portfolios additionally maintain billions of {dollars} in funding to Israel sourced from the on a regular basis taxes of group members. State and native governments throughout the U.S. maintain greater than $4 trillion in all investments of their funding portfolios. No less than $1.6 billion in Israel Bonds is held between state governments, municipal governments, and public pension funds nationwide. These funding {dollars} come from each particular person, family, and enterprise inside the municipal or state borders that pay property taxes, revenue taxes, and gross sales taxes, making them a number of the most consultant swimming pools of {dollars} invested on behalf of the general public. Saper says that campaigns focusing on the funding of those native {dollars} “invite individuals to reckon with how implicated we’re right here at residence with the atrocities we’re witnessing overseas.”

The Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Neighborhood is focusing on Cuyahoga County’s $16 million funding in Israel Bonds. The Growth Company for Israel sells these bonds to boost international funds for the Israeli treasury. The sale of Israel Bonds gives crucial monetary assist to the Israeli authorities and its army, and bondholders keep no oversight of how their funds are spent as soon as invested. “The Break the Bonds name for institutional divestment actually got here out of an absolute horror on the a part of of us who’re taxpayers on the county, metropolis degree, state degree […] to study that many establishments in the USA really instantly mortgage cash to the Israeli authorities and army unrestricted within the type of Israel Bonds,” explains Dani Noble, senior campaigns organizer at JVP and member chief of JVP-Philadelphia.

Throughout the U.S., dozens of states and municipalities buy Israel Bonds. Palm Seashore County, Florida, lately made headlines for being the world’s largest investor in Israel Bonds with $700 million in holdings. In Ohio, moreover Cuyahoga County’s $16 million in holdings, 14 different Ohio counties additionally maintain Israel Bonds, whereas the Ohio Treasury has greater than $260 million in Israel Bonds.

At a gathering on June 4, 2024, Cuyahoga County Council Members Cheryl Stephens and Patrick Kelly launched a Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Neighborhood–supported decision that may, in accordance with its textual content, “urg[e] the Funding Advisory Committee to amend the County’s Funding Coverage to prohibit future investments in any international securities.” Dozens of Cuyahoga County residents addressed the council concerning the decision, together with Palestinian Individuals whose relations in Palestine have been topic to Israeli violence. One resident, Shereen Naser, later instructed Information 5 Cleveland that considered one of her cousins, a school scholar in Palestine, had lately been detained by the Israeli army. “I’m questioning if the cuffs round her wrists are paid for by my tax {dollars},” she mentioned.

After it was launched, Cuyahoga County’s Decision No. R2024-0208 was referred to the Committee of the Entire. Nonetheless, the decision was later withdrawn following strain from teams that categorized it as antisemitic or in violation of Ohio’s anti-Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) regulation. The Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Neighborhood drafted responses refuting these claims and shared them with the Cuyahoga County Council. The coalition continues to strain native lawmakers for motion on the problem. “We would like this $16 million to be reinvested right here at residence,” says Faraj.

A Break the Bonds marketing campaign based mostly in Windfall, Rhode Island, has additionally gathered steam since final yr. As lately as 2022, Windfall held about $2 million in Israel Bonds. These bonds matured, and the town not has direct investments in Israel. “We need to maintain it that means,” says Joel Reinstein, an organizer with JVP in Rhode Island.

At a Windfall Metropolis Council assembly on June 6, 2024, councilors launched Ordinance 45610, which might prohibit future investments within the bonds of governments sustaining a army occupation or accused of committing warfare crimes or human rights violations. The proposed ordinance was referred to the council’s finance committee, which can resolve whether or not to ship it again to the council for a vote. If the committee sends the ordinance again to the complete council, it might want to obtain two affirmative majority votes to go—and will require a 3rd majority vote within the occasion that Mayor Brett Smiley vetoes it, as he has said he’ll. Main as much as a vote, organizers from JVP and coalition companions, together with the Windfall Youth Scholar Motion and Rhode Island Democratic Socialists of America, are holding rallies and contacting lawmakers to indicate assist for the laws.

College students chant slogans throughout a pro-Palestine protest at George Washington College in April 2024. Throughout the nation, college students have referred to as on their faculties to cease doing enterprise with firms they see as supporting the Israeli warfare on Gaza. *Picture by Ali Khaligh/Center East Photos/AFP through Getty Photos*

In the meantime, in New York state, organizers are focusing on a special monetary instrument getting used to assist Israel’s assaults on Palestinians. The Not on Our Dime! marketing campaign and an eponymous act sponsored by Meeting Member Zohran Mamdani and State Senator Jabari Brisport within the New York State Meeting and the New York Senate, respectively, launched in Might 2023. If the Not on Our Dime! Act passes, New York nonprofit organizations that present monetary assist to Israel’s army or Israeli settler teams may very well be sued for not less than $1 million and lose their tax-exempt standing. At the moment, New York charities ship greater than $60 million in tax-exempt {dollars} per yr to Israel to fund “the violation of worldwide regulation,” in accordance with Mamdani in a June 2024 interview with Zeteo.

Sumaya Awad, a Palestinian New Yorker and director of technique on the Adalah Justice Challenge, a coalition accomplice engaged on the marketing campaign, says that the Not on Our Dime! marketing campaign is highly effective and distinctive as a result of “it provides a software, a pathway to divert funds from apartheid, to divert funds from genocide, and as a substitute to speculate them in life and in public items.”

This yr, the Not on Our Dime! Act was expanded, and the marketing campaign was relaunched with new supporters, together with representatives from union UAW Area 9A and New York Congressional Consultant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who spoke at a relaunch occasion on Might 20 in Albany, New York. The invoice’s language has been up to date to explicitly title the Israeli authorities’s assaults in Gaza and make sure that New York–based mostly nonprofit organizations offering funding for these assaults can be topic to the laws.

“For this invoice to proceed to carry a mirror to the world round us one yr later, we would have liked to broaden its scope,” says Mamdani. He factors out that the marketing campaign’s messaging and up to date invoice language now replicate “the information of genocide in Gaza, a proliferation of New York charities’ fundraising in assist of items within the Israeli Military perpetrating that genocide, and the renewed requires the Israeli settler motion to broaden into Gaza.”

Gabriel Acevero, member of the Maryland Home of Delegates, launched comparable laws earlier this yr in Maryland. It was referred to the Maryland Home Judiciary Committee for assessment and has but to maneuver ahead.

For Jewish organizers, these efforts usually are not solely a matter of divesting public {dollars} but additionally of extricating their non secular traditions from the violence of Israel’s occupation and its genocide in Gaza. Noble explains that the Growth Company for Israel has traditionally linked the sale of Israel Bonds to Jewish rituals, together with “imposing a convention of gifting” the bonds at bar and bat mitzvahs and weddings and passing them down as a part of a household’s legacy when sitting shiva. “We completely are devoted not simply to ending that materials assist but additionally to reclaiming our traditions from violence and from warfare,” Noble says.

The Not on Our Dime! marketing campaign’s title additionally echoes a well-recognized rallying cry amongst anti-Zionist Jews, who say “not in our title” to demand that their non secular id and a harmful conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism not be weaponized to obscure Israel’s atrocities.

Various and cross-movement coalitions have been important to the progress of those campaigns to halt the switch of U.S. taxpayer {dollars} from Ohio, Rhode Island, and New York to Israel. Common mass demonstrations of solidarity with Palestinians nationwide have additionally spurred the efforts. “The horizon of potentialities is opened up by the historic uprisings that we’re seeing within the streets, and throughout campuses, and actually throughout the globe,” says Saper.

For organizers trying to experience this wave, JVP and the Not on Our Dime! marketing campaign provide alternatives to become involved or launch comparable initiatives in new locales.

Reinstein of JVP–Rhode Island says the native and state-level campaigns which are being solid now are the constructing blocks wanted to drive significant change on the federal degree. “The extra on the municipal degree that we will really cease the circulate of money to Israel’s violence, the extra that may construct as much as a nationwide motion that might lastly create some accountability.”