Divest From Apartheid

Since June 2024, the East Bay Democratic Socialists of America has prioritized local support for the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) Movement. EBDSA’s Divest from Apartheid campaign, working with a coalition of partners, achieved a major victory in 2024 by getting the Alameda County Treasurer to divest $32 million in Caterpillar bonds, and in 2025 by getting the Alameda County Board of Supervisors to adopt Ethical Investment Criteria that will prohibit other treasury investments in companies that facilitate human rights abuses in Palestine and around the world.   

We are not stopping with these major victories! There are municipal investment funds all over the Bay Area that must divest from companies that support Israel’s apartheid system and the Gaza genocide. There are public contracts with companies that support ICE invasions of our communities that must be cancelled. Local retirees draw from pension funds that are heavily invested in industries that destroy our environment, incarcerate our neighbors, surveil our streets, and fuel human rights abuses from Oakland to Sudan, Iran to Palestine!  

Our work is only beginning and we want YOU to be a part of it. 

We'll be working on getting more local governments to divest from human rights abusers and we need our community to help with that work. As Bay Area residents, we expect our taxes (money generated from our labor) to benefit our communities by building roads, schools, libraries, housing; providing us with quality universal healthcare; upending poverty and the climate crisis generated by the capitalist economy; and providing ourselves as workers with the dignified working conditions and wages that we deserve. We do not consent to our taxes further lining the pockets of executives of companies that profit off of the oppression of the global working class.

Currently, governments across the Bay Area have invested hundreds of millions of dollars of our public funds in companies that enable Israeli genocide of Palestinians, its decades-long occupation of Palestinian lands, and system of apartheid towards the Palestinian people. Meanwhile, our school and transportation systems are underfunded, we face crippling debt accessing healthcare and higher education, and we cannot afford to live in our own communities any longer. 

In turn, the Israeli military, bolstered by the support it receives by many of these same companies, trains US law enforcement and ICE thugs in tactics that allow them to more brutally terrorize our communities at home. We are, in essence, funding our own oppression. 

DSA members, constituting the predominant socialist organization in the US, proudly identify as anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist. We know that as a working class, we must exist in solidarity with our global community members suffering under the imperialist war machine. We must fight for our Palestinian comrades, for Palestinian liberation. 

Please learn more about our ongoing work here. 

To join our campaign and get directly involved in our work please sign up here and an organizer will get in touch with you.

We have work to do together to win!!