via Democracy Now! Headline Oct 1
In Massachusetts, members of the group Cambridge for Palestine delivered an open letter Wednesday calling on Cambridge city officials to divest public money from companies they say are complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The letter was signed by nearly 2,000 people, including Jewish residents, who urged city councillors not to conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism and pointed to Israel’s continued deadly strikes on Gaza despite the U.S.-brokered so-called ceasefire. Cambridge for Palestine says an investigation uncovered $28 million of city investments in weapons and surveillance companies that are directly complicit in Israel’s ongoing attacks on Palestinians. This is Ayah Al-Zubi, a democratic socialist and the youngest city councillor in Cambridge’s history.
Ayah Al-Zubi: “We are out here today because we are getting ready to launch our divestment campaign to the City Council, where hopefully we will call on the city to divest some of their financial funding out of companies that are invested in the genocide of Palestinians. … Cambridge has a history of standing up against abhorrent human rights abuses. We stood up against apartheid South Africa back in the late 1970s. We divested from Polaroid in its human rights abuses in apartheid South Africa. And three years later, after the stand that we took, Massachusetts also divested pension money out of South Africa.”
