[[link removed]]

THE QUIET SUCCESS OF THE ISRAEL DIVESTMENT MOVEMENT  
[[link removed]]


 

Marianne Dhenin
August 6, 2024
Yes Magazine
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ 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
[[link removed]] of dollars in
foreign aid to Israel. The flow of taxpayer funds to Israel’s
military has only increased
[[link removed]] since
Israeli forces launched an attack on Gaza in October 2023, in which as
many as 186,000 Palestinians have been killed
[[link removed](24)01169-3/fulltext],
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
[[link removed]] 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)
[[link removed]] in New York City.

As demands for Palestinian liberation grow louder than ever before
[[link removed]] 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 [[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]],
a JVP-led initiative that seeds and supports local efforts to demand
divestment from Israel Bonds
[[link removed]] nationwide.

In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, home to Cleveland, Mohammed Faraj works with
the Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] in
all investments in their investment portfolios. At least $1.6 billion
in Israel Bonds
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]].
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
[[link removed]].
In Ohio, besides Cuyahoga County’s $16 million in holdings, 14
other Ohio counties
[[link removed]] also
hold Israel Bonds, while the Ohio Treasury has more than $260 million
in Israel Bonds
[[link removed].].

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
[[link removed]].”
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
[[link removed]],”
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
[[link removed]-] 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
[[link removed]].
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
[[link removed]],
councilors introduced Ordinance 45610
[[link removed]],
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
[[link removed]].
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
[[link removed]] and contacting
lawmakers
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 
[[link removed]]and
the New York Senate
[[link removed]],
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_
[[link removed]].

Sumaya Awad, a Palestinian New Yorker and director of strategy at
the Adalah Justice Project [[link removed]], 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
[[link removed]] and
New York Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
[[link removed]],
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.”

Gabriel Acevero, member of the Maryland House of Delegates, introduced
similar legislation earlier this year in Maryland
[[link removed]].
It was referred to the Maryland House Judiciary Committee for review
and has yet to move forward.

For Jewish organizers, these efforts are not only a matter of
divesting public dollars but also of extricating their religious
traditions from the violence of Israel’s occupation and its genocide
in Gaza. Noble explains that the Development Corporation for Israel
has historically linked the sale of Israel Bonds to Jewish rituals,
including “imposing a tradition of gifting” the bonds at bar and
bat mitzvahs and weddings and passing them down as part of a
family’s legacy when sitting shiva. “We absolutely are dedicated
not just to ending that material support but also to reclaiming our
traditions from violence and from war,” Noble says.

The Not on Our Dime! campaign’s title also echoes a familiar
rallying cry among anti-Zionist Jews
[[link removed]],
who say “not in our name”
[[link removed]] to
demand that their religious identity and a dangerous conflation of
anti-Zionism and antisemitism
[[link removed]] not be
weaponized to obscure Israel’s atrocities
[[link removed]].

Diverse and cross-movement coalitions have been vital to the progress
of these campaigns to halt the transfer of U.S. taxpayer dollars from
Ohio, Rhode Island, and New York to Israel. Regular mass
demonstrations of solidarity with Palestinians nationwide have also
spurred the efforts. “The horizon of possibilities is opened up by
the historic uprisings that we’re seeing in the streets, and across
campuses
[[link removed]],
and really across the globe
[[link removed]],”
says Saper.

For organizers looking to ride this wave, JVP and the Not on Our
Dime! campaign offer opportunities
[[link removed]] to get involved or launch
similar initiatives in new locales
[[link removed]].

Reinstein of JVP–Rhode Island says the local and state-level
campaigns that are being forged now are the building blocks needed to
force meaningful change on the federal level. “The more on the
municipal level that we can actually stop the flow of cash to
Israel’s violence, the more that can build up to a national movement
that could finally create some accountability.”

he United States has historically provided hundreds of billions
[[link removed]] of dollars in
foreign aid to Israel. The flow of taxpayer funds to Israel’s
military has only increased
[[link removed]] since
Israeli forces launched an attack on Gaza in October 2023, in which as
many as 186,000 Palestinians have been killed
[[link removed](24)01169-3/fulltext],
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
[[link removed]] 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)
[[link removed]] in New York City.

As demands for Palestinian liberation grow louder than ever before
[[link removed]] 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 [[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]],
a JVP-led initiative that seeds and supports local efforts to demand
divestment from Israel Bonds
[[link removed]] nationwide.

In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, home to Cleveland, Mohammed Faraj works with
the Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] in
all investments in their investment portfolios. At least $1.6 billion
in Israel Bonds
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]].
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
[[link removed]].
In Ohio, besides Cuyahoga County’s $16 million in holdings, 14
other Ohio counties
[[link removed]] also
hold Israel Bonds, while the Ohio Treasury has more than $260 million
in Israel Bonds
[[link removed].].

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
[[link removed]].”
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
[[link removed]],”
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
[[link removed]-] 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
[[link removed]].
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
[[link removed]],
councilors introduced Ordinance 45610
[[link removed]],
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
[[link removed]].
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
[[link removed]] and contacting
lawmakers
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 
[[link removed]]and
the New York Senate
[[link removed]],
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_
[[link removed]].

Sumaya Awad, a Palestinian New Yorker and director of strategy at
the Adalah Justice Project [[link removed]], 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
[[link removed]] and
New York Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
[[link removed]],
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.”

Gabriel Acevero, member of the Maryland House of Delegates, introduced
similar legislation earlier this year in Maryland
[[link removed]].
It was referred to the Maryland House Judiciary Committee for review
and has yet to move forward.

For Jewish organizers, these efforts are not only a matter of
divesting public dollars but also of extricating their religious
traditions from the violence of Israel’s occupation and its genocide
in Gaza. Noble explains that the Development Corporation for Israel
has historically linked the sale of Israel Bonds to Jewish rituals,
including “imposing a tradition of gifting” the bonds at bar and
bat mitzvahs and weddings and passing them down as part of a
family’s legacy when sitting shiva. “We absolutely are dedicated
not just to ending that material support but also to reclaiming our
traditions from violence and from war,” Noble says.

The Not on Our Dime! campaign’s title also echoes a familiar
rallying cry among anti-Zionist Jews
[[link removed]],
who say “not in our name”
[[link removed]] to
demand that their religious identity and a dangerous conflation of
anti-Zionism and antisemitism
[[link removed]] not be
weaponized to obscure Israel’s atrocities
[[link removed]].

Diverse and cross-movement coalitions have been vital to the progress
of these campaigns to halt the transfer of U.S. taxpayer dollars from
Ohio, Rhode Island, and New York to Israel. Regular mass
demonstrations of solidarity with Palestinians nationwide have also
spurred the efforts. “The horizon of possibilities is opened up by
the historic uprisings that we’re seeing in the streets, and across
campuses
[[link removed]],
and really across the globe
[[link removed]],”
says Saper.

For organizers looking to ride this wave, JVP and the Not on Our
Dime! campaign offer opportunities
[[link removed]] to get involved or launch
similar initiatives in new locales
[[link removed]].

Reinstein of JVP–Rhode Island says the local and state-level
campaigns that are being forged now are the building blocks needed to
force meaningful change on the federal level. “The more on the
municipal level that we can actually stop the flow of cash to
Israel’s violence, the more that can build up to a national movement
that could finally create some accountability.”

he United States has historically provided hundreds of billions
[[link removed]] of dollars in
foreign aid to Israel. The flow of taxpayer funds to Israel’s
military has only increased
[[link removed]] since
Israeli forces launched an attack on Gaza in October 2023, in which as
many as 186,000 Palestinians have been killed
[[link removed](24)01169-3/fulltext],
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
[[link removed]] 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)
[[link removed]] in New York City.

As demands for Palestinian liberation grow louder than ever before
[[link removed]] 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 [[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]],
a JVP-led initiative that seeds and supports local efforts to demand
divestment from Israel Bonds
[[link removed]] nationwide.

In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, home to Cleveland, Mohammed Faraj works with
the Cleveland Palestine Advocacy Community
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] in
all investments in their investment portfolios. At least $1.6 billion
in Israel Bonds
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]].
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
[[link removed]].
In Ohio, besides Cuyahoga County’s $16 million in holdings, 14
other Ohio counties
[[link removed]] also
hold Israel Bonds, while the Ohio Treasury has more than $260 million
in Israel Bonds
[[link removed].].

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
[[link removed]].”
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
[[link removed]],”
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
[[link removed]-] 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
[[link removed]].
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
[[link removed]],
councilors introduced Ordinance 45610
[[link removed]],
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
[[link removed]].
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
[[link removed]] and contacting
lawmakers
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 
[[link removed]]and
the New York Senate
[[link removed]],
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_
[[link removed]].

Sumaya Awad, a Palestinian New Yorker and director of strategy at
the Adalah Justice Project [[link removed]], 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
[[link removed]] and
New York Congressional Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
[[link removed]],
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.”

Gabriel Acevero, member of the Maryland House of Delegates, introduced
similar legislation earlier this year in Maryland
[[link removed]].
It was referred to the Maryland House Judiciary Committee for review
and has yet to move forward.

For Jewish organizers, these efforts are not only a matter of
divesting public dollars but also of extricating their religious
traditions from the violence of Israel’s occupation and its genocide
in Gaza. Noble explains that the Development Corporation for Israel
has historically linked the sale of Israel Bonds to Jewish rituals,
including “imposing a tradition of gifting” the bonds at bar and
bat mitzvahs and weddings and passing them down as part of a
family’s legacy when sitting shiva. “We absolutely are dedicated
not just to ending that material support but also to reclaiming our
traditions from violence and from war,” Noble says.

The Not on Our Dime! campaign’s title also echoes a familiar
rallying cry among anti-Zionist Jews
[[link removed]],
who say “not in our name”
[[link removed]] to
demand that their religious identity and a dangerous conflation of
anti-Zionism and antisemitism
[[link removed]] not be
weaponized to obscure Israel’s atrocities
[[link removed]].

Diverse and cross-movement coalitions have been vital to the progress
of these campaigns to halt the transfer of U.S. taxpayer dollars from
Ohio, Rhode Island, and New York to Israel. Regular mass
demonstrations of solidarity with Palestinians nationwide have also
spurred the efforts. “The horizon of possibilities is opened up by
the historic uprisings that we’re seeing in the streets, and across
campuses
[[link removed]],
and really across the globe
[[link removed]],”
says Saper.

For organizers looking to ride this wave, JVP and the Not on Our
Dime! campaign offer opportunities
[[link removed]] to get involved or launch
similar initiatives in new locales
[[link removed]].

Reinstein of JVP–Rhode Island says the local and state-level
campaigns that are being forged now are the building blocks needed to
force meaningful change on the federal level. “The more on the
municipal level that we can actually stop the flow of cash to
Israel’s violence, the more that can build up to a national movement
that could finally create some accountability.”

_MARIANNE DHENIN
[[link removed]] is a YES! Media
contributing writer. She covers social and environmental justice and
politics._

_YES! Media is a nonprofit, independent publisher of solutions
journalism.  Through rigorous reporting on the positive ways
communities are responding to social problems and insightful
commentary that sparks constructive discourse, YES! Media inspires
people to build a more just, sustainable, and compassionate world._

* BDS Movement
[[link removed]]
* Divestment
[[link removed]]
* Israel/Gaza
[[link removed]]
* Palestinians
[[link removed]]

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