FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November 14, 2019

IFNOTNOW RELEASES 2020 PLATFORM, LEADING WITH CALL FOR PUBLIC OFFICIALS TO DEFUND OCCUPATION

The announcement comes just before a national gathering of IfNotNow’s top leaders, and is the latest development in the political conversation around American military funding to the Israeli government, which has become mainstream in the past several months.

IfNotNow, the Jewish movement that spent the summer in New Hampshire asking public officials how they will pressure the Israeli government to end the occupation, announced their 2020 Platform today. The IfNotNow 2020 Platform contains two commitments that their members will organize to get all public officials to support The Commitment to Defund Occupation and the Commitment to Fight Antisemitism and White Nationalism.

“The leading pillar of the IfNotNow 2020 Platform is #DefundOccupation. This campaign will support anyone, anywhere to demand that their public officials stop giving a blank check to the Israeli government as its political leaders deepen the unjust military occupation of the Palestinian people,” said Emily Mayer, a co-founder of IfNotNow, “It will be one of the most ambitious efforts to change American Middle East foreign policy in a generation.”

The call to DefundOccupation comes after yet another round of violence between Gaza and Israel, and amidst a shifting policy conversation around American military funding to Israel — a foreign policy framework that Presidents across the spectrum have used over and over again, most recently in 1991. The campaign goes one step farther than the public commitments of most public officials. Whereas many public officials have said they would leverage U.S. military funding upon further settlement expansion and formal annexation of the West Bank, IfNotNow’s commitment to defund occupation calls on public officials to develop and support legislation and/or resolutions ensuring assistance “does not fund any activities of occupation, such as home demolitions, the imprisonment of Palestinian children, Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, and the siege of Gaza.”

The IfNotNow 2020 Platform also includes a commitment for public officials to Fight Antisemitism and White Nationalism, marking a significant step for the movement in bringing together IfNotNow’s previous organizing fighting against Israel’s military occupation and their organzing against rising antisemitism and white nationalism. White nationalist ideology is rooted in antisemitic beliefs and white nationalists have been behind the violent attacks against synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway and serious threats, like just seen in Colorado.

“These struggles are already connected. The forces threatening Jews are connected to the forces that threaten Palestinians. But more than that, the political establishment regularly uses baseless accusations of antisemitism to undermine legitimate criticism of Israel — this puts Jews in danger by obscuring the threat of violent antisemitism coming from white nationalist movements, and it puts Palestinians in danger by limiting U.S. pressure on the Israeli government to end the occupation,” said Emily Mayer, “Now they are connected in one political platform.

This new phase of IfNotNow’s strategy will begin in Chicago this weekend, where 75 of IfNotNow’s top leaders from around the country will gather to strategize about how to bring IfNotNow’s 2020 Platform back to their communities and ensure the American government’s money funds freedom, not occupation.

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The IfNotNow 2020 Platform is a project of If Not Now Education Fund, a movement led by young Jews to transform the American Jewish community’s support for the occupation into a call for freedom and dignity for all Israelis and Palestinians. The organization was founded in 2014 during the Gaza War as a moral call to the American Jewish community to oppose the war. IfNotNow has over 2,000 members and chapters in 14 cities and over a dozen college campuses. Learn more about IfNotNow at www.ifnotnowmovement.org and learn more about their 2020 Platform at www.ifnotnowmovement.org/2020-platform.