Join Teachers Pushing for Historic Victory for Palestine!
California teachers have unknowingly invested billions of dollars in companies fueling the genocide in Gaza. Here’s how you can get involved in the historic divestment campaign targeting CalSTRS that is spreading across the state.
Since October 2023, as Israel bombed and starved the people of Gaza and terrorized the entire region, the question of “how can we stop this?” has pumped unrelentingly through our hearts. We took to the streets and our electeds’ offices in protest and became increasingly frustrated each time we were ignored.
Trying to appeal to some semblance of humanity in politicians using the democratic process has been enragingly ineffective at bringing about justice, or even a brief respite from violence, to our relatives in Palestine. To dismantle the death machine, we have to address what powers it. This monster that builds bombs and drops them requires vast amounts of resources. It is expensive to mine resources and build sophisticated killing devices. It’s expensive to hoist them in the air and position them exactly over a school. It requires a constant input of capital to keep this genocide going. The reason this death machine supply chain continues to murder families is because the violence generates profits for individual, corporate, and institutional investors.
To stop the carnage, we must destroy those profits. And there’s a way we can do that together.
Divesting from Genocide
In 2005, Palestinian civil society launched the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement (BDS) – modeled after the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa – to cut the artery sustaining the parasitic companies that leech from the circulation of capital and funnel it into atrocities. BDS pressures institutions to withdraw investments from Israel and companies enabling Israeli apartheid in order to make support for Israel unprofitable. Since 2024, dozens of institutions divested from Israeli apartheid, with DSA members and chapters – including mine – often contributing to these victories. And now California’s educators are joining the movement.
CalSTRS Divest is a state-wide campaign by teachers and retirees who object to their retirement contributions enabling the murder of Palestinian children. The California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or CalSTRS, is the pension fund for public school teachers, and it is truly massive. At $390 billion with 1 million members, it is the largest educator-only pension fund in the world, and the second-largest pension fund in the US. At this scale, the fund has real power in the world economy, and the choice of investments makes a difference in where capital is pumped, and consequently, which industries flourish, and which wither.
Many educators, myself included, were shocked to learn that CalSTRS invests the money we set aside for our retirement in Israeli bonds and companies like Palantir, Lockheed Martin, Caterpillar, and Chevron that manufacture the bombs dropping on refugee camps in Rafah, the bulldozers flattening family homes in the West Bank, the planes and jet fuel used to bomb Palestinian hospitals, and the cameras and AI systems used to surveil families in the West Bank. In fact, CalSTRS currently has $2.7 billion invested in the Israeli genocide. While teachers struggle to find the resources to educate our students in overcrowded classrooms, our pension fund provides financing that allows a genocidal actor to murder classrooms full of students.
As teachers, we often spend more time with the kids we teach than with our own families, and grow to love them. Taking teachers’ retirement money and using it to murder kids, then forcing retired teachers to live on blood money is sick and twisted. An unimaginably grotesque machination of empire, it turns the social welfare afforded to people “here” into a dependency on the depredation of people “there”. The CalSTRS Investment Board has tried to wheedle their way out of responsibility for its bureaucratic complicity by saying that without these investments, teachers would not have a safe way to retire. Looking beyond the disgusting nature of this argument that it is okay to kill babies if it makes money, research refutes the claim: Divesting completely from Israeli Apartheid would not significantly affect the returns of the portfolio.
The CalSTRS Divest Campaign
Disgusted by the horrors that our pension system finances, current and retired teachers and educator unions across the state have joined the CalSTRS Divest campaign in droves. The potential victory here is huge: Not only is the divestment amount enough to make the complicit companies take notice themselves, but a divestment on this scale would set a powerful precedent for further divestment around the country. If one of the country’s largest pension funds says no to blood money, it opens the door for organizers in states across the nation to demand that their retirement systems follow suit.
Further, this divestment will be a huge labor win. Teaching is one of the few remaining professions in the United States with substantial union density and the guarantee of a pension. This divestment victory would show that workers will be heard when it comes to decisions regarding their retirement funds and continue the proud tradition of international labor solidarity.
This is not the first time teachers have won divestment. In 2018, Bay Area teachers, horrified by increased incarceration of children as part of Trump’s immigration policy, convinced the CalSTRS Board to divest $12 million from private prisons with help from the California Federation of Teachers. Teachers have also won divestment from thermal coal and tobacco. Persistent organizing paid off in the past, and it is time to do it again!
Between the scale of a state-wide campaign and the conservatism of the CalSTRS Board, winning divestment will be a substantial challenge. While most teachers are not in favor of genocide, there are thousands of teachers across the state who are unaware of the contents of their retirement portfolio. We need to substantially increase our outreach in order to hold the CalSTRS board accountable to its own ethical investment policy. The re-election of many of these board members and those who appoint them is fast approaching, which gives us an opportunity to pressure them, but we need everyone’s help to act in time.
Join the campaign!
DSA chapters from several areas including Sacramento and my chapter in the East Bay are organizing to strengthen this movement. But since the pension fund represents teachers across the state of California, we need all DSA chapters in California to engage to make divestment a reality. Here’s what we can do to help win this campaign:
Develop connections with public educators and teacher union locals in our respective areas and ensure that they pass resolutions supporting CalSTRS Divest. Sign up for the Teach-In on June 13 to learn more!
Get your chapter to adopt a resolution supporting CalSTRS Divest (template here) and be prepared to mobilize attendance at a quarterly CalSTRS Board meeting (stay tuned here)
This will be a significant undertaking with its share of challenges. But we are not starting from scratch. CalSTRS Divest has done tremendous groundwork to get to this point and is ready to teach your chapter how to get plugged into the campaign. This genocide runs on money. Together, we will starve the beast and feed the children.
To find out more about how to get involved, please fill out our interest form at ebdsa.us/calstrsdivest.