Voters across Vermont will decide on the Apartheid-Free Community (AFC) Pledge on March 4th, Town Meeting Day. Organizers collected thousands of signatures to place the advisory question against Israeli apartheid and genocide on ballots or official town meeting warnings in six towns: Winooski, Vergennes, Montpelier, Thetford, Newfane, and Brattleboro.
In two towns, Ferrisburgh and Burlington, pro-Israel Select Board or Council majorities blocked the question from going to voters. However, AFC supporters in Ferrisburgh and organizers in many other towns, will introduce the Pledge from the floor at town meetings on March 4th.
This AFC campaign is groundbreaking in bringing the question of Israeli apartheid and Palestinian rights directly to voters. The advisory question asks officials to take steps to “end all support to Israel’s Apartheid regime, settler colonialism, and military occupation.”
The American Friends Service Committee launched the AFC campaign in 2022. It is a Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) strategy based on education and moving communities toward concrete action. In 2005 hundreds of Palestinian labor and community organizations started BDS and called on us to join the global picket line to break support for Israeli apartheid.
BDS demands are ending Israeli occupation and colonization, recognizing the full equality of Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and realizing the right of return for Palestinian refugees ethnically cleansed by Israel. BDS targets states, corporations, and institutions complicit with Israeli apartheid.
More than four hundred unions, faith groups, community organizations, and businesses have adopted the AFC pledge internationally. Forty organizations have adopted the pledge in Vermont.
Apartheid-Free Community is About All of Our Futures
There have been unprecedented global solidarity protests over the past 16 months against the genocide in Gaza. Palestinians have continued their struggle for self-determination, and thousands have returned to reclaim their bombed-out neighborhoods in northern Gaza in recent days.
In this context, AFC has two broad goals. First, educating for action addressing the roots of the Israeli aggression and Palestinian resistance in the 75-year Western colonization of Palestine. Second, while it builds effective solidarity with Palestinians, AFC is centrally about our own struggles for justice and a livable future.
Amnesty International issued a 300-page report in November 2024 titled, ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza. The report documents the practice and intent of genocide. The report also states: “An assessment of the historical context demonstrates that Israel’s offensive is occurring in the context of its unlawful military occupation and system of apartheid against Palestinians […] predicated on endemic dehumanization of Palestinians.” That is, the most barbaric crime against humanity that exists, genocide, is caused by Israeli colonization and apartheid, aided and abetted by U.S. military and economic support.
In terms of our own resistance against authoritarianism and declining living standards in the U.S., the AFC campaign could not be timelier. In order to defend the U.S.’s massive military and economic commitment to Israel and strategic operations in the oil-rich Middle East, both major parties, many states, and educational institutions have doubled down on suppressing protests and free speech against the genocide.
One tactic used to suppress dissent is claiming that opposing Israeli apartheid and Zionism is antisemitic. Zionism is a century-old political project of the colonization of Palestine backed first by Britain and later primarily by U.S. military aid. It is based on expelling the indigenous population and establishing a Jewish supremacist, Jewish-majority state in Palestine. In other words, it is settler colonialism.
Many Jews, including in the rapidly growing organization Jewish Voice for Peace, oppose Israel’s colonization of Palestine. Challenging Israeli apartheid, the system of domination Israel uses to prevent expelled Palestinians from returning to their land and to ensure a Jewish majority state, may make Zionists uncomfortable, but that is very different from antisemitism or making anyone unsafe. Struggles for social justice often make defenders of the status quo uncomfortable, as we have seen with struggles against slavery and Jim Crow, and with struggles for abortion rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and immigrant rights.
The actual consequences of Zionist and U.S. support for Israel are entirely negative for most people. That a Christian Right organization claims to be the biggest pro-Israel group in the U.S. is part of understanding the political forces at work here. The Israeli genocide in Gaza and the related demonization of Palestinians as terrorists and less than human has fueled increased bigotry and violence against Arabs and Palestinians.
After October 7, 2023, a racist shot three Palestinian students near UVM in Burlington. The dehumanization of Palestinians helps legitimize attacking free speech rights of those opposing genocide, including the federal government targeting unions that stand with Palestinian workers against genocide. Astronomical amounts of military aid continue to flow to Israel. Billions of dollars go to war crimes while already meager federal support for housing, education, and climate adaptation, among other pressing local needs, are on the chopping block.
The Trump regime is also accelerating apartheid at home. Apartheid is a system of discrimination based on unequal standing, racism, and economic oppression. The criminalization and deportation of migrant workers who may not have the correct documents and legal status, and the planned gutting of vital government health and human services and civil rights further cements institutionalized class and social inequality in Vermont and elsewhere.
Responding to Opponents
From the Zionist opponents of AFC, we have seen at least two counter arguments. The first is that AFC is divisive and makes the Jewish community unsafe. Burlington Democrats on the City Council who overrode democratic norms to block AFC from the ballot claimed, therefore, that AFC is the wrong way to approach the Palestine issue.
The objective of opponents here is to restrict the discussion of Palestine to terms that accept Israeli apartheid and U.S. support for it. This is sometimes accompanied by reference to the discredited “two-state solution”—whereby Palestinians are supposed to give up 80% of Palestine in exchange for a Palestinian “state” that lacks control over its borders, trade, and resources. It is also an attempt to define the Jewish community as only Zionist Jews.
There are, of course, real problems with racism, bigotry, and antisemitism in Vermont and everywhere in the world, mostly originating from right-wing politics (such as those who inhabit the White House). The AFC pledge clearly states that we affirm “our commitment to freedom, justice, and equality for the Palestinian people and all people” and that we oppose “all forms of racism, bigotry, discrimination, and oppression.”
Because AFC is attempting to deepen popular understanding of Israeli apartheid and occupation and to promote action, such as BDS and protecting free speech, it is the most convincing approach to foster justice for everyone in a way that refuses to exclude Palestinians.
The second bogus argument is that AFC is not a local issue. The first weeks of the Trump regime, including the ICE raids against migrant workers in Vermont, refute the argument.
Israeli apartheid and colonization draw nothing but admiration from Trump and in providing a political model serve to bolster the far right’s agenda. Ethnonationalism provides a basis for scapegoating and deporting migrant workers. Denial of rights to equality, dignity, and democracy provides ideological support in the U.S. for planned draconian cuts to government programs that operate in the public’s interests.
The determined Palestinian struggle for democracy and self-determination and a future country where Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Arabs have equal rights is actually a beacon of hope and guidance for our own resistance to the far right. If we have in mind a future of justice, dignity, and freedom, then that is a struggle worth joining. From Palestine to Vermont, as the old labor slogan demands, “An injury to one is an injury to all.”
Paul Fleckenstein is a member of the Vermont Coalition for Palestinian Liberation and the Tempest Collective.
