The City University of New York Professional Staff Congress Delegate Assembly passed a resolution calling for the divestment from Israeli companies and the Israeli government in response to the war against Hamas in Gaza.
The PSC central decision-making body called on the union, which claims to represent 30,000 faculty and staff in the CUNY system, to divest “from any investment vehicle that includes in its portfolio stocks and bonds of Israeli companies and Israeli government bonds.”
The union would be required to meet this divestment objective by next January, and by next February, the congress would establish a volunteer committee to oversee further divestment.
The PSC Delegate Assembly also called on the union to communicate to the Teachers’ Retirement System of the City of New York that it supported divestment from Israel.
The January 23 resolution drew a comparison between the union’s call for divestment and past divestment by American institutions to protest apartheid rule in South Africa.
“For over a year, 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,” reads the resolution. “These attacks have included those on schools and UN shelters, in violation of commonly accepted ‘rules of war.’”
The assembly argued that the International Court of Justice’s opinion last January asserted that it was “plausible” that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Since then, however, then-ICJ president Joan Donoghue told the BBC that the statement was about rights to protection from genocide rather than about whether genocide was occurring.
New York City Workers for Palestine on Wednesday claimed on Instagram that the resolution’s passage as a victory that would eventually lead the District Council 37 public sector union and the United Federation of Teachers to adopt divestment against Israel.
SAFE Campus files complaint
The American Jewish Committee wrote on X/Twitter on Thursday that the resolution was “Yet another occasion where CUNY’s faculty and staff union distracts itself from its key responsibilities to focus on smearing Israel.”
Students, Alumni, and Faculty for Equality on Campus (SAFE Campus) said on Tuesday it filed a complaint to the New York State Division of Human Rights, arguing that the resolution served as a discriminatory boycott in contradiction with state law.
The complaint also argued that PSC-CUNY violated a state executive order against the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign and would subsequently require the state to divest from the union.
“It is no coincidence that hundreds – perhaps thousands – of Jewish faculty members have left the PSC union,” reads the letter.
NYC Workers for Palestine and the resolution noted that it followed a September DC37 Local 3005 health worker union vote to divest from Israel. The new resolution was almost the same as a September PSC-CUNY Graduate Center resolution. An anti-Israel boycott resolution was rejected by the congress in 2024.