Tomorrow, Dec 14th, Massachusetts Teachers Association Board of Directors to vote on Pro-BDS Policy Changes
In an unsurprising move, the MTA Board of Directors will vote on two policy changes this weekend to “divest all staff pension funds and other investments from businesses that provide arms or other forms of military assistance to the State of Israel.” :
Proposed Policy Changes NBI #10.2024 NBI 03 - “Divestment For Peace and Justice - Section 2” and “Divestment For Peace and Justice - Section 3.”
This initiative is pushed by MTA Rank and File for Palestine, a group created by former president of the MTA Merrie Najimy.
They liken the MTA’s vote to divest from Apartheid South Africa. But as the AJC notes in its excellent report on the MTA’s anti-Israel leanings:
“In the intervening years, however, the MTA has taken no comparable action on the colonization and ethnic cleansing of Tibet (China), the destruction of indigenous communities in the Amazon (Brazil), the genocide of members of the Tutsi tribe by Hutus in Rwanda, the perpetuation of slavery in several North African countries, the persecution of Kurds (Turkey), the imprisonment of more than one million Uyghur Muslims (China), the colonization and devastation of Ukraine (Russia), the ongoing persecution and subjugation of women across the Middle East, or the years of missile and terror attacks directed against civilians in Israel (Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and other surrogates).”
According to MTA Rank and File for Israel , Najimy’s group passed out flyers at the annual MTA
One need only look at the MTA’s past track record on Israel to determine how this vote is likely to go. Another step is to look at who is on the MTA Board of Directors. According to its most recently filed 990, the MTA Board of Directors includes:
Joseph Herosy: Herosy has a long history of anti-Israel activism.
And also from October 8, 2023 - the day after the largest massacre of Jews in a single day since the Holocaust
And here he is reposting from The Grayzone, a Russia and China propaganda outlet, about prisoners freed thanks to Hamas!
Here are emails, first shared by Parents Defending Education, in which Herosy talks about the “Israel lobby” being in service to “US imperialism” and in which he defends his claims of “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” with an incorrect and incomplete history of pre-1948 relations between Jews and Arabs:
“There was peace between Arabs Muslims, Christians and Jews in Palestine before the Nakba of 1948 when thousands of Palestinians were killed and nearly half driven from their homes. The settlers who committed this crime were Europeans who were backed by British & US Imperialists in a clear case of settler colonialism or the forced displacement of an indigenous population by an outside group which forms permanent settlements. This is the same kind of violent displacement we recognise when we do land acknowledgements at the start of our meetings. Racial/religious/ethnic differences are weaponized to enable land theft and exploitation for profit by the British and US capitalist ruling classes.
The history of Palestine / Israel since then has been one of continued land theft by a racist apartheid regime that has been propped up by billions in annual US funding. This is the source of the violence in Palestine / Israel and the only way to bring peace for all people in the region is to end the apartheid regime, which begins with a permanent ceasefire.”
Najimy, also at the April 2024 MTA Convention, put forward a New Business Item on “defending academic freedom” :
Tellingly, Najimy’s NBI is against a false interpretation of the IHRA
“the dangerous and reductive redefinition of “antisemitism” to include criticism of the state of Israel, in order to suppress advocacy for Palestinian rights…”
If these motions are to pass, it will give us a strong indication not only of the decided anti-Israel bent of the MTA leadership but of the influence that the MTA Rank and File for Palestine, founded by the former president of the MTA, exerts over the teachers association.