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These Teachers Want the Largest Union in the Country to Rescind its Biden Endorsement Over Gaza [1]
['Sarah Lazare', 'Elie Mystal', 'Dave Zirin', 'Amitav Ghosh', 'Jack Mirkinson', 'Gregg Gonsalves', 'Calvin Trillin', 'D.D. Guttenplan', 'Richard J. Evans', 'Hasan Ali']
Date: 2024-01-22 09:59:00+00:00
Politics / These Teachers Want the Largest Union in the Country to Rescind its Biden Endorsement Over Gaza A rank-and-file campaign inside the National Education Association is demanding the president stop “sending military funding, equipment, and intelligence to Israel.”
President Joe Biden speaks during a National Education Association event in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 2023. (Ting Shen / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
This article is a joint publication of The Nation and Workday Magazine, a nonprofit newsroom devoted to holding the powerful accountable through the perspective of workers.
When Israel escalated its military operations against Gaza in October, Rahaf Othman was so distraught, she said, she “couldn’t think straight.” The 45-year-old Palestinian American, who teaches social studies at Harold L. Richards High School in Oak Lawn, Ill., recalled that she “started getting nightmares from my own experiences when I was in Palestine. I was functional at work, but barely functional. My brain was mush. I was getting traumatized every time I turned on my phone.”
“For the first month, people were asking me what we should do, but I couldn’t think, couldn’t focus.” While in this state, she said she discovered that she could lean on some of her colleagues. “Educators rallied together and created this group, Educators for Palestine. I am grateful they brought me along for the ride.”
Othman is a member of the Illinois Education Association (IEA) Local 218, which covers an area to the south of Chicago, part of the 3 million–strong National Education Association (NEA), the largest labor union in the United States. She is now part of a member effort to press the NEA to put real muscle behind supporting a cease-fire, one prong in a small-but-growing campaign within the US labor movement.
But the rank-and-file campaign goes beyond demanding an end to Israel’s military operations, which have killed at least 22,000 Palestinians, 12,000 of them children. Othman and other members want the NEA to revoke its endorsement of Joe Biden for the 2024 presidential race until the president secures a “permanent cease-fire,” stops “sending military funding, equipment, and intelligence to Israel,” and commits “to a fair due process for asylum-seekers and refugees.”
“Until NEA takes this step,” a member petition states, signatories are planning to withhold voluntary donations from the union’s political action committee, which is used to support candidates. (Signatories are not planning to withhold their union dues.)
The demand is eye-catching, because Biden appeared to really want the NEA’s endorsement: The president addressed the union by video at its last representative assembly in July 2023. And first lady Jill Biden has made her long-term membership in NEA a key part of her public political identity. “You—all of you—make me proud to be a longtime member of the NEA,” Jill Biden said in an August 2023 address to educators.
The NEA, in turn, has had a supportive relationship with the Biden administration. The union’s endorsement of Biden for the 2024 presidential race came early—in April of 2023 for the Democratic primary, and in July of 2023 for the general election.
Biden’s identity as a “union man” was central to his presidential run in 2020, and he is setting a similar tone during the current race: He held the first big political event of his reelection campaign at a union rally in Philadelphia, in what the Associated Press said is an indicator of “just how much Biden is counting on labor support to carry him to a second term.”
For members of the NEA who are desperate to stop the killing of civilians in Gaza, making this support contingent on the Biden administration’s meaningful push for a cease-fire is the best leverage they have. The goal, they say, is not to help former president Donald Trump win but the opposite. “Getting President Biden to change his position on Israel will help him to beat Trump,” reads an explanatory document, circulated with the petition. “People who vote Democratic are overwhelmingly in support of a permanent ceasefire and disapprove of Biden’s handling of the situation.” Polling shows the majority of Americans want a cease-fire, including more than 70 percent of Democrats.
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[1] Url:
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/nea-union-biden-endorsement-gaza/
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