November marks four years since the launch of our Deadly Exchange campaign! Four years of protesting and preventing top-ranking US police, ICE, and FBI officials from training with Israeli forces. Four years of painstaking research. Four years of actions. And four years of wins!
From legislative victories in Durham and New Orleans, to pressure campaigns in New England, to a recent campus win at Tufts, the Deadly Exchange campaign has grown through powerful coalitions and our belief that safety comes from investing in communities — not militarized police.
In 2018, Durham, NC became the first city in the United States to ban police exchanges with the Israeli military. This was followed up by wins in Vermont and Northampton, MA where local coalitions and JVP members used public pressure to successfully demand cancelled participation
As our actions in front of the ADL HQ get bigger, the ADL have worked to hide the program from view. What used to be a featured ADL program is now rebranded and removed from their website.
Across the country, our actions have grown in size, number, and power.We are modeling a Jewish community built outside reliance on the police state. We use our bodies, our voices, and our vision of a better world to stand in opposition to racist policing.
Four years on, this work is more urgent than ever. The demands of the campaign have been embedded in broader campaigns to defund and demilitarize the police, from the 8 to Abolition platform to the Poor People’s Campaign.
It’s never been clearer how deadly these exchanges really are, and how the sharing of technologies and tactics of repression impact us all. We are in a moment where the interconnectedness of the brutality of the US police and of Israel’s apartheid regime is being laid bare.
This is a moment to make change. We are growing, we are powerful and we will continue to build until we win.
On Monday, the Israeli military released 250 Palestinian political prisoners, along with over 1,700 Palestinians who had been held hostage by the Israeli military in detention without charge.
However, thousands more, mostly from the occupied West Bank, remain imprisoned, with no intended path for their release. While the world focuses on the ceasefire agreement, thousands of Palestinians continue to suffer in Israeli prisons, facing starvation, torture, and sexual violence. 🧵
Meanwhile, 154 Palestinian prisoners freed under the Gaza ceasefire agreement have been expelled from their native land and exiled to Egypt.
More than 9,000 Palestinians remain detained by the Israeli military across historic Palestine, including more than at least 450 children and 3,500 Palestinians held under administrative detention without charge, and. And since 1967, the Israeli government has withheld the bodies of more than 730 deceased Palestinians from their families.
Palestinian human rights attorney Diana Buttu says while people are happy for a pause in the slaughter, she finds it “repulsive” that Palestinians had to bargain with their own oppressors. “It should have been that the world put sanctions on Israel to stop the genocide, rather than forcing Palestinians to negotiate an end to it.”
This year, we observe the High Holy Days in grief and outrage. Our movements have grown more powerful than ever before, yet we remain unable to halt the relentless US-Israeli war machine that continues to ravage Gaza—inflicting death, destruction, and famine onto the Palestinian people.
For this reason, we raise our voices daily against the Israeli military’s genocide of Palestinians—especially as we enter the new year 5786. We urge fellow Jews and Jewish institutions to end their support for the Israeli military’s desolation in Gaza, reject Jewish supremacy, and denounce the false idol of ethno-nationalism. 🧵
JVP New Orleans held a selichot ritual action at representative Troy Carter’s office to demand that he sign onto the Block The Bombs. On the final day of Rosh Hashanah, @JVPBayArea in the People’s Arms Embargo at Oakland International Airport to raise awareness about the airport's role as a hub for shipping F-35 fighter jet components to the Israeli military. @jvphouston gathered in front of Chevron’s national headquarters to protest its role as a genocide profiteer—supplying 70% of the apartheid state’s natural gas-powered electricity.
JVP chapters in Kansas City, Los Angeles, New Haven, Boston, San Diego, Atlanta, Rhode Island, and more held Tashlich rituals—symbolic acts of casting away transgressions for the New Year. Vermont/New Hampshire held theirs downstream from a weapons manufacturer. Tashlich reminds us that all water is a site of global struggle, from Gaza to communities worldwide.
On August 18, the Trump regime — at the urging of pro-genocide politicians like Marco Rubio and Laura Loomer — announced it would freeze all visas for Palestinians from Gaza seeking to enter the US.
Nearly two years into funding the genocide that continues to cause thousands of life-altering injuries, the US is deliberately exacerbating the violence it is funding by denying safe passage, life-saving medical care, and freedom of movement to the very people it is helps injure. 🧵
As Jews who know our history, we recognize that the US denying entry to, and hindering the movement of, Palestinians facing genocide is the same violent tactic that was used to target our Jewish families fleeing state violence before and during World War II.
When the MS St. Louis circled the coast of Florida in 1939, carrying 907 European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, it was President Roosevelt who made the infamous choice to deny them entry to the United States, forcing them to return to Nazi Germany and their deaths.
It was a choice for the US government to deny safe passage to 907 Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. And right now, as the Israeli military drops bombs drop on over 2 million displaced and starved Palestinians, we know that it is the choice of Israeli officials to enact genocide on Palestinians.
It was a choice for our government to send $30 billion to the Israeli military over the last 22 months, and it is the choice of our elected officials to continue to not call for an arms embargo.
Journalists across Palestine are issuing an urgent appeal: This is the final call for international journalists to pressure their governments and come to Gaza.
This call follows the deliberate assassination of a group of Palestinian journalists inside Nasser hospital and the subsequent acceleration of the Israeli military’s occupation of Gaza City.
To the Israeli government, even Palestinian trees pose a so-called security threat.
This past weekend, in just three days, the Israeli military uprooted 10,000 olive trees in al-Mughayyir village, in the occupied West Bank. Some of the trees were over 100 years-old.
The Israeli military’s Central Command Chief Avi Bluth said about the order: "Uprooting the trees was intended to deter everyone. Not just this village, but any village."
This act of environmental destruction is collective punishment, aimed at destroying Palestinian livelihood and severing Palestinian connection to their land. We stand with Palestinians in al-Mughayyir, as they grieve the loss of 10,000 olive trees.
Educators for Palestine Claims Victory Against Racism and Hate, Despite NEA Board Decision 🧵
Washington, D.C. | Educators for Palestine is deeply disappointed with the decision of the National Education Association’s Board of Directors to nullify the majority vote to “Drop the ADL” at its recent convention.
This action was taken despite the fact that the July 2025 NEA Representative Assembly delegates took the historic step to direct the NEA to, “not use, endorse, or publicize any materials from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL),” such as its curricular materials or its statistics.
On Friday, July 18, the NEA Board of Directors voted not to act on NBI#39, a resolution that called for ending NEA’s use of ADL materials, professional development, and data. Succumbing to pressure put on the NEA by outside, right-wing groups like the ADL, harms union power.