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.
The 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.