10 July 2024
Open letter to the American Federation of Teachers: Divest from Israel Bonds
We write as the General Union of Palestinian Teachers to express our gratitude to the local sections of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) that have passed motions calling on AFT to divest its State of Israel bonds.
We urge the AFT membership to support this measure to ensure that teachers in the US are not funding what the International Court of Justice has decided is a plausible genocide committed by Israel against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza, including many of our members and their students, and its decades-long military occupation and apartheid regime against all Palestinians.
Just as in the struggle against apartheid South Africa, in which US teachers and their unions played a noble role, ending funding for Israel’s crimes against us is the most effective form of solidarity that we as Palestinians are calling for. It is needed now more than ever.
Israel’s genocide in Gaza has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians, including at least 15,500 children, with another 4,000 children missing under the rubble. Israel has killed one or both parents of at least 15,000 Palestinian children in Gaza. Palestinian children in Gaza who survive Israeli shelling and bombs are dying from Israeli imposed famine, quite literally starving to death. Gaza is also now home to the largest cohort of child amputees in history. UN agencies say that, on average, ten children in Gaza lose one or both legs each day.
More than 600,000 Palestinian children in Gaza have been deprived of their right to attend school for the past eight months. According to a recent UN report, at least 76.4% of schools in Gaza “will either need full reconstruction or major rehabilitation work to be functional again.” The report shows a continuous increase by Israel in “directly targeting” Palestinian schools in Gaza, including those sheltering the more than one million Palestinians that Israel has forcibly displaced from their homes. Israeli forces have also damaged or completely destroyed all Palestinian universities in Gaza.
This is what dozens of UN experts have determined to be scholasticide and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing described as the “killing of learning.”
The killing of learning.
As educators, we ask that you take a moment to consider what this means for Palestinians in Gaza and for Palestinian society as a whole.
As teachers and as Palestinians, we are devastated by the news from our colleagues and their students in Gaza. We know that Israel’s genocide in Gaza is nothing more than the logical progression of 76 years of Israeli oppression against all Palestinians, carried out with total impunity due to the complicity of states, corporations and institutions as well as to a lack of will on the part of many Western states to enforce international law. We know that the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza is an unprecedentedly brutal phase of what Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have concluded is an apartheid regime, a crime against humanity.
We also know that only by isolating apartheid Israel’s genocidal regime, as apartheid South Africa was isolated, will we as Palestinians be able to enjoy our full rights. Unions have an important and urgent role to play in that.
Additionally, investing in genocide is simply a bad investment. In February, Moody’s downgraded Israel’s credit rating for the first time ever and changed its outlook to “negative.” The head of the Israel Securities Authority revealed that foreign investors have withdrawn nearly $4 billion from Israel bonds since Israel started its genocide in Gaza. The Presbyterian Church, which has 1.1 million members and more than 8,000 congregations across the US, voted unanimously to divest from Israel Bonds. Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, the largest in the world, withdrew all of its investments, almost half a billion dollars, in Israel Bonds. The General Conference of The United Methodist Church also voted to exclude Israel bonds due to its “prolonged military occupation” of Palestinian territory.
Since our union joined 30 other Palestinian trade unions calling on trade unions around the world to “take immediate action” to “restrain the Israeli war machine,” another 35,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed.
We write to you to convey the urgency of the moment and the moral obligation to do everything in your power to put an end to Israel’s crimes against us as Palestinians. At the very least, we ask that you, in particular as US teachers, not fund Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
Your effective solidarity can and will put Palestinian teachers and students one step closer to returning back to school.
General Union of Palestinian Teachers
