ACLU rejects staff petition to divest from Israel and condemn war in Gaza

Group reportedly decided public stance on war was ‘not needed’ to carry out its domestic mission

The American Civil Liberties Union reportedly rejected a petition this month from hundreds of staffers to publicly oppose U.S. military aid to Israel and divest from potential financial ties to the country amid its ongoing war with Gaza.

The national board of directors at the civil rights organization reportedly rejected the petition 50 to 4, with one abstention earlier this month, according to a memo obtained by The Intercept.

Leadership reportedly told the petitioners that the organization’s mission is to protect U.S. civil rights and liberties, so “a position on the war is not needed to carry out this essential domestic work.” The memo reportedly added that divestment would have a “very deleterious impact on our overall investment return,” and argued further that the ACLU “lacks expertise and staff dedicated to this region or conflict.”

“It is not the ACLU’s practice to take positions on overseas conflicts,” a spokesperson told the outlet in a statement.

The group of signers, made up of nearly 700 staffers from across the group’s national and state chapters, argued the ACLU has previously taken a stand on hot-button international crises, including the Vietnam War and South African apartheid.

The ACLU isn’t the first high-profile U.S. institution to grapple with how to appropriately weigh in on the Israel-Hamas conflict, a war intimately tied to U.S. politics considering the more than $17bn in military aid America has given to Israel.

ACLU executive director Anthony Romero at an event in Miami in 2017. The civil rights organization’s board of directors rejected petition in early October, according to reports (AFP via Getty Images)

Leaders at U.S. universities in particular have been criticized both for what they have and haven’t said about the ongoing war.

Pro-Palestine activists asked the Department of Education earlier this month to investigate the University of Georgia over its alleged “extreme differential treatment” singling out Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students. In a letter to officials, the students cited comments from the university’s president suggesting pro-Palestine demonstrations are “hateful“ as one example of the alleged discrimination.

At Harvard, meanwhile, university leaders decided in May that the school will no longer “issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.”

“Because few, if any, world events can be entirely isolated from conflicting viewpoints, issuing official empathy statements runs the risk of alienating some members of the community by expressing implicit solidarity with others,” a faculty group considering the matter wrote.

The decision followed months of controversy at the elite university and the resignation in January of president Claudine Gay, who critics argued hadn’t done enough to condemn Hamas and antisemitism generally.

The Israel-Hamas war – sparked by the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attack on Israel – has reportedly claimed more than an estimated 40,000 lives, including vast numbers of mostly Palestinian civilians, in a conflict some international observers argue has become a genocide.