‘Not in my Name’: how a new generation is divesting from Israeli apartheid

It’s a damp, vaguely rainy Thursday afternoon in Copenhagen, and I’m on my bike riding towards Østerbro, an upscale neighborhood hugging the city’s northeastern harbor. I am heading towards the Israeli embassy to meet about twenty-five other Jewish people in protest of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. 

We gather near two concrete blocks on the street corner outside of the embassy. Printed posters are distributed to us demonstrators. One poster calls for a permanent ceasefire, the other proclaims, “jøder siger: ikke i vores navn”, Jews say: not in our name. 

“Not in our name” has been a rallying cry for Jewish demonstrators across the world during this most brutal of episodes of Israeli state violence against Palestinians, and for good reason. The Israeli regime and aligned governments regularly invoke the safety of the Jewish people as a rationale for the unbridled violence perpetrated against Palestinians, leveraging the legacy of the holocaust and antisemitism to generate impunity for the Israeli political elite. But this rallying cry is increasingly being adopted by a new cohort as well – those who have materially benefitted from Israeli apartheid in the past but are now joining the movement to boycott and divest from Israeli human rights abuses.

When I was 21 years old, I inherited my first chunk of money from my family, a 7-figure stock portfolio. It felt like something out of the blue. Despite knowing that my family was generally “well off,” I didn’t know the extent of it. Years later, I learned about Resource Generation (RG), an organization that guides those with wealth and/or class privilege to commit to the equitable distribution of wealth, land, and power. I began to question the contradictions in my life, especially when it came to wealth and politics. How could I be in the streets calling for lofty ideas like “justice” and crying out against violence done in my name while sitting on a stock portfolio full of extractive, exploitative companies that are actively earning a profit on the genocide? 

I am not alone in these questions. I am, by chance of birth, part of the largest generational transfer of wealth in human history. By 2045, an estimated $84.4 trillion in assets will be passed down from baby boomers to millennials and Gen Z, with $72.6 trillion being inherited by direct descendants, people like me, much of it tax-free. Others like me are now using the wealth they were born into to support the movement for Palestine. 

That day, after coming home from the protest at the embassy, I made my largest single divestment move to date, selling my $600,000 Berkshire Hathaway position on the grounds that Berkshire Hathaway holds a 6% ($29 billion) stake in Chevron, the oil tycoon blacklisted by the BDS movement for its involvement in extracting and transferring oil through occupied Palestinian territory and propping up the economy of the Israeli apartheid state. Not to mention the company’s nearly 28% stake in Occidental Petroleum, another oil giant with a record of environmental degradation and disregard for the rights of indigenous people. Then, I wrote out on an RG email listserv to ask if anyone else was divesting from Berkshire Hathaway and would be interested in helping me compose a letter to the company.

I was soon in contact with several other RG members. We worked together on the letter and sent it to the company. We also decided to share it as a template in a virtual toolkit on anti-apartheid investment alternatives that was featured in an online “Embodied Divestment” seminar series co-organized by RG, art.coop, Rad Planners, and Redistribution Law. The series, attended by 117 inheritors, focused on divestment as a collective tactic to create political pressure on the Israeli apartheid regime and how individual wealthy people can play a role by organizing themselves, their families, and their communities. The series is just one example of how organizations like RG are driving financial and political support from the wealthiest sectors of society in support of mass movements for change.

In many ways, my personal journey with inheritance and divestment mirrors my journey with coming to a full-hearted pro-Palestinian stance. Raised in an Israel-supporting Jewish environment, I had to undergo a process of disillusionment, a shedding of the powerful illusions and lies that make up the mainstream Western narrative of what Israel represents, to be able to see and accept the reality of brutal, colonial dispossession, occupation, and apartheid that Israel is built on. Likewise, a process of disillusionment with class privilege and wealth must take place if we are going to respond to the realities of climate change, inequality, and the exploitation of most human beings for the profit of the few. These two illusory narratives, the narrative that Israel is a biblically ordained “land without a people for a people without a land” rather than a colonial apartheid state, and the narrative that the accumulation of wealth is a sign of personal success, rather than a sign of a rigged and failing global political economy, are connected. Most directly, it is our society’s massive inequality that allows the profit-making interests of industries to drive foreign policy toward endless warfare. Indeed, billions are being made on the bombardment of Gaza as I write this now, and many of the beneficiaries are people like myself: young people who oppose these injustices and our own role in them. At the end of the day, when I chant “not in my name,” I want to mean it.