As Israel’s war in Gaza continues into its 12th month, more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed — including over 16,000 children and 11,000 women. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has repeated his call for an immediate ceasefire, labelling the level of death and destruction in Gaza as unprecedented during his seven-year tenure.
Violence is spreading across the Israeli-occupied West Bank where Jewish settlers are attacking Palestinian families, forcefully taking over many properties. In a Sept. 6 protest against settlement expansion near the West Bank town of Nablus, 26-year-old woman Aysenur Eygi, a dual Turkish-American citizen, was shot and killed by Israeli troops.
While the war in Gaza has raged for almost a year, there’s growing opposition to the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel, which has sent billions of dollars-worth of bombs and other weapons used against Gaza’s civilian population. Opposition has taken many forms including widespread protests on college campuses. On Sept. 4, Portland, Maine became the fourth U.S. city to adopt a resolution calling for divestment from corporations complicit in Israel’s occupation and repression of the Palestinian people. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Abigail Fuller, co-chair of Maine Voices for Palestinian Rights, who describes her group’s successful campaign that resulted in a unanimous 9 to 0 vote by members of Portland’s City Council in support of divestment.
ABIGAIL FULLER: Our resolution asks the City of Portland not to invest in companies that provide Israel with weapons and other military equipment used in Gaza or that operate in and contribute to Israel’s illegal settlements in the West Bank, or enable or profit from the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
And we passed it because we’re taxpayers and we care where our money is invested, and we don’t want to be complicit in the genocide in Gaza through our taxpayer money going to the city, which would then invest it in companies that are complicit.
So that’s the sort of the reasoning behind it. We have tried and tried and tried to get the federal government, like many people around the country have, to push Israel for a ceasefire or to stop ending arms to Israel, and that hasn’t happened.
So going to the municipal level seems like the next logical step to us.
SCOTT HARRIS: I don’t know if I’d be inaccurate to say whatever investments the city of Portland, Maine has in Israel don’t really amount to a great deal of money. And you could correct me if I’m wrong. So this appears to be more of a powerful symbol of the issue and the crisis in Gaza right now.
ABIGAIL FULLER: Primarily, we are, in fact, trying to have a really material effect on what’s happening in Gaza. Yes, Portland is not a large city. It doesn’t have a huge amount of funds to invest, but we are hoping that what we’ve done will happen all over the country.
There are retirement funds in which people are calling for those to divest as well from Israel. There are people pushing, you know, banks to divest. And so we feel like we’re a part of that.
I mean, we alone, of course, are not going to make the difference, but we’re part of a much larger movement that we feel really can have an effect on Israel.
SCOTT HARRIS: If you could, give us a flavor of the debate that occurred at the City Council chambers, where members of your group and allies promoted passage of this resolution. And, of course, there were some opponents of that resolution as well who spoke. What do you think carried the day? That was a very lopsided unanimous vote in favor of the resolution.
Tell us a little bit about that debate.
ABIGAIL FULLER: Well, first of all, we did not go into that debate blind. We did an enormous amount of ground work to bring the resolution to the city council and to ensure that it had the votes for passage. What we did is actually met individually with each city councilor. We reached out to them, had individual meetings with them.
In most cases, we asked people we knew who also knew a particular city councilor to help us set up that meeting. We had discussions with them to explain what divestment was and why we were doing it. So we really did what some people call relational organizing with each and every Seattle City Council member so that they understood what we were doing.
We knew beforehand that we had the majority and that it was going to pass and probably even be unanimous because we had done all that groundwork.
Well, yeah, there were a lot of, differing views. Obviously, I would say it was mostly civil, for sure. There were a lot of people on the pro-Israel Anti-Divestment side who said things like this would make them feel safer. They’ve always felt welcome in Maine, and this is not going to make them feel welcome anymore.
A lot of people just really felt like this divestment resolution take sides that, the city council shouldn’t be taking a stand, that it’s not under the jurisdiction of the city council to take a stand. So there are all kind of arguments, all sorts of arguments like that.
And on our side, the people who wanted the divestment resolution passed gave really heartfelt testimony about how heartsick we are to see photographs of dead children in Gaza, you know, virtually every day to know that our government is enabling this to happen, that sort of thing.
I should also say that even though a majority of the people speaking against divestment were from the Jewish community, we have a huge number of people in the main coalition for Palestine and in Jewish Voices for peace, which is working for us, who are in favor of divestment.
So we had a lot of especially young Jewish people standing up and saying, I am a proud Jewish American and I support this divestment proposal.
So I would say to one of the key things is that early on, we knew that to try to combat the anti-Semitism that would be accused of we wanted to make sure that we involved Jewish voices in our efforts, and we did that from the beginning.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Abigail Fuller (16:23) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
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