The Quiet Success of the Israel Divestment Movement
A man holds up a Palestinian flag atop removed barricades piled up at a Free Gaza encampment at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 2024. The encampment was part of a nationwide movement of college students demanding their universities divest financial ties from Israel. Photo by Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
Grassroots efforts to divest local U.S. taxpayer dollars from Israel over its ongoing genocide of Palestinians are gaining steam.
he United States has historically provided hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid to Israel. The flow of taxpayer funds to Israel’s military has only increased since Israeli forces launched an attack on Gaza in October 2023, in which as many as 186,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to an estimate published in The Lancet in July 2024.
Beyond the federal dollars funding the ongoing attack on Gaza, there are also investments made on the state and municipal levels to support Israel’s violence against Palestinians. “The ethnic cleansing and horrors that we’re witnessing being carried out by the Israeli government are deeply entangled in material support from the United States, and that happens on multiple levels,” says Jay Saper, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) in New York City.
As demands for Palestinian liberation grow louder than ever before in defiance of Israel’s continuing assaults on the occupied nation and its people, organizers with JVP and other groups critical of U.S. funding for Israel have ramped up efforts targeting this support in their own backyards. These efforts include the Not on Our Dime! campaign in New York state, which aims to end subsidies for New York–registered charitable organizations that fundraise to support the Israeli military and violent settler groups, and the Break the Bonds campaign, a JVP-led initiative that seeds and supports local efforts to demand divestment from Israel Bonds nationwide.
In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, home to Cleveland, Mohammed Faraj works with the Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community on a local effort connected to JVP’s Break the Bonds campaign. He says the coalition’s “No New Bonds” campaign has grown stronger and more organized since Israel launched its latest assault on Gaza, and coalition partners have made a concerted effort to reach local lawmakers. “After October, there was just a feeling of wanting to talk to, really, anybody who would listen,” explains Faraj. “We realized how inaccessible our federal legislators are and have been, [but] our local political leaders are here, and they’re accessible.”
Not only are state and local lawmakers more accessible to constituents than federal lawmakers, but local investment portfolios also hold billions of dollars in funding to Israel sourced from the everyday taxes of community members. State and local governments across the U.S. hold more than $4 trillion in all investments in their investment portfolios. At least $1.6 billion in Israel Bonds is held between state governments, municipal governments, and public pension funds nationwide. Those investment dollars come from every individual, household, and business within the municipal or state borders that pay property taxes, income taxes, and sales taxes, making them some of the most representative pools of dollars invested on behalf of the public. Saper says that campaigns targeting the investment of these local dollars “invite people to reckon with how implicated we are here at home with the atrocities we are witnessing abroad.”
The Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community is targeting Cuyahoga County’s $16 million investment in Israel Bonds. The Development Corporation for Israel sells these bonds to raise foreign funds for the Israeli treasury. The sale of Israel Bonds provides critical financial support to the Israeli government and its military, and bondholders maintain no oversight of how their funds are spent once invested. “The Break the Bonds call for institutional divestment really came out of an absolute horror on the part of folks who are taxpayers at the county, city level, state level […] to learn that many institutions in the United States actually directly loan money to the Israeli government and military unrestricted in the form of Israel Bonds,” explains Dani Noble, senior campaigns organizer at JVP and member leader of JVP-Philadelphia.
Across the U.S., dozens of states and municipalities purchase Israel Bonds. Palm Beach County, Florida, recently made headlines for being the world’s largest investor in Israel Bonds with $700 million in holdings. In Ohio, besides Cuyahoga County’s $16 million in holdings, 14 other Ohio counties also hold Israel Bonds, while the Ohio Treasury has more than $260 million in Israel Bonds.
At a meeting on June 4, 2024, Cuyahoga County Council Members Cheryl Stephens and Patrick Kelly introduced a Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community–supported resolution that would, according to its text, “urg[e] the Investment Advisory Committee to amend the County’s Investment Policy to prohibit future investments in any foreign securities.” Dozens of Cuyahoga County residents addressed the council regarding the resolution, including Palestinian Americans whose family members in Palestine have been subject to Israeli violence. One resident, Shereen Naser, later told News 5 Cleveland that one of her cousins, a college student in Palestine, had recently been detained by the Israeli military. “I’m wondering if the cuffs around her wrists are paid for by my tax dollars,” she said.
After it was introduced, Cuyahoga County’s Resolution No. R2024-0208 was referred to the Committee of the Whole. However, the resolution was later withdrawn following pressure from groups that categorized it as antisemitic or in violation of Ohio’s anti-Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) law. The Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community drafted responses refuting these claims and shared them with the Cuyahoga County Council. The coalition continues to pressure local lawmakers for action on the issue. “We want this $16 million to be reinvested here at home,” says Faraj.
A Break the Bonds campaign based in Providence, Rhode Island, has also gathered steam since last year. As recently as 2022, Providence held about $2 million in Israel Bonds. Those bonds matured, and the city no longer has direct investments in Israel. “We want to keep it that way,” says Joel Reinstein, an organizer with JVP in Rhode Island.
At a Providence City Council meeting on June 6, 2024, councilors introduced Ordinance 45610, which would prohibit future investments in the bonds of governments maintaining a military occupation or accused of committing war crimes or human rights violations. The proposed ordinance was referred to the council’s finance committee, which will decide whether to send it back to the council for a vote. If the committee sends the ordinance back to the full council, it will need to receive two affirmative majority votes to pass—and may require a third majority vote in the event that Mayor Brett Smiley vetoes it, as he has stated he will. Leading up to a vote, organizers from JVP and coalition partners, including the Providence Youth Student Movement and Rhode Island Democratic Socialists of America, are holding rallies and contacting lawmakers to show support for the legislation.
Students chant slogans during a pro-Palestine protest at George Washington University in April 2024. Across the country, students have called on their schools to stop doing business with companies they see as supporting the Israeli war on Gaza. Photo by Ali Khaligh/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
Meanwhile, in New York state, organizers are targeting a different financial instrument being used to support Israel’s attacks on Palestinians. The Not on Our Dime! campaign and an eponymous act sponsored by Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani and State Senator Jabari Brisport in the New York State Assembly and the New York Senate, respectively, launched in May 2023. If the Not on Our Dime! Act passes, New York nonprofit organizations that provide financial support to Israel’s military or Israeli settler groups could be sued for at least $1 million and lose their tax-exempt status. Currently, New York charities send more than $60 million in tax-exempt dollars per year to Israel to fund “the violation of international law,” according to Mamdani in a June 2024 interview with Zeteo.
Sumaya Awad, a Palestinian New Yorker and director of strategy at the Adalah Justice Project, a coalition partner working on the campaign, says that the Not on Our Dime! campaign is powerful and unique because “it offers a tool, a pathway to divert funds from apartheid, to divert funds from genocide, and instead to invest them in life and in public goods.”
This year, the Not on Our Dime! Act was expanded, and the campaign was relaunched with new supporters, including representatives from union UAW Region 9A and New York Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who spoke at a relaunch event on May 20 in Albany, New York. The bill’s language has been updated to explicitly name the Israeli government’s attacks in Gaza and ensure that New York–based nonprofit organizations providing funding for those attacks would be subject to the legislation.
“For this bill to continue to hold a mirror to the world around us one year later, we needed to expand its scope,” says Mamdani. He points out that the campaign’s messaging and updated bill language now reflect “the facts of genocide in Gaza, a proliferation of New York charities’ fundraising in support of units in the Israeli Army perpetrating that genocide, and the renewed calls for the Israeli settler movement to expand into Gaza.”