CUNY Alliance for Inclusion

www.cunyallianceforinclusion.org

January 28, 2025

The Delegate Assembly of CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (the PSC) passed the Israeli Investments Divestment Resolution on January 23, 2025. They resolved to send “an official letter to the Teachers Retirement System (TRS) board expressing its support for complete disinvestment from Israel” because “the Israeli government has engaged in bombing and other warfare in the Gaza Strip killing at least 40,000 people including, by Israel’s own account, 23,000 civilians.”

But what could have precipitated this tragic war and led to the union’s call for an “official letter” by members of the PSC though they are far-removed from the war zone? There is simply no clue in the text of the resolution. One would have expected a resolution by academics to have illuminated possible causes of the conflict and not simply sweep under the rug facts that don’t support their conclusions.

A first step in resolving this conundrum is to do the math. If 23,000 civilians have been killed, then 17,000 Gazan combatants must have lost their lives in this conflict. How did this happen? How did this start?

For two decades now, Hamas has been igniting periodic wars against Israel knowing that anti-Zionists would come to its defense and portray Israel as the aggressor. The PSC has been complicit in this. Its June 2021 resolution rewrote history by beginning their account of the war with Israel’s response to a thousand missiles launched by Hamas at Israeli towns. The resolution condemned Israel for massacring Palestinians without any mention of Hamas or the missiles they launched. This signal from points of darkness around the globe gave Hamas the confidence to launch the October 7th massacre that started the present war.

And now, again, this new PSC Resolution does not mention Hamas or its unspeakably brutal attack: the torture, rape, mutilation, kidnapping and massacre of entire families that broke the cease fire that had been in place since the previous war. Now the PSC has two resolutions condemning Israel and not a single resolution condemning any other country; not Russia, Iran, China or North Korea.

Hamas built hundreds of miles of tunnels to protect its fighters, but not a single shelter for its citizens. All this for the purpose of guaranteeing that Gazan civilians would be casualties so that regressive unions around the world would condemn Israel.

This Resolution does not speak truth to power, it hides and distorts the truth in order to find soulless solidarity that disgraces CUNY by seeking to demonize a people that faces an enemy that is sworn to annihilate it, even if this entails destroying the hopes of its own people for a better life.