The largest labor union in America is splintering over demands from some teacher members that it revoke its endorsement of President Biden unless he secures a “permanent cease-fire” at Gaza. 

A petition led by an “Educators for Palestine” group within the National Education Association is urging the union to rescind support for Mr. Biden in the 2024 presidential race unless he stops “sending military funding, equipment, and intelligence to Israel” and pushes to end Israel’s “siege” of Gaza. The signatories pledge to withhold their donations to the NEA until it heeds their demands. 

Mr. Biden is counting on support from the American labor movement in his battle for re-election against President Trump. The NEA, in particular, with its more than three million members, has so far been an unwavering source of endorsements for him in this election cycle as well as in 2020. So shifting attitudes toward Mr. Biden within the union membership could be cause for concern in the general election. 

“The most pro-public education and pro-union administration in modern history” is how NEA president, Becky Pringle, penned her early endorsement for Mr. Biden and Vice President Harris in April of 2023. “Educators have champions in the White House,” he told the union in its last representative assembly in July 2023. First lady Jill Biden, who’s taken up public school education as a key part of her political agenda, calls herself “a longtime member of the NEA.”

So too do the anti-Israel members of the NEA ultimately support the Biden administration, as long as they can sway him to change his position on Israel. “If our pressure succeeds, it will help, not hinder, Biden’s chances of defeating Trump,”  reads an explanatory document in defense of the petition. “And shouldn’t we be willing to fight for our core values regardless of which party the President belongs to?”

Mr. Biden’s position on Israel, as it currently stands, “overwhelmingly violates NEA’s core values related to justice,” the petition asserts.  “As other unions are acting in solidarity with the call from Palestinian trade unions for a ceasefire, NEA is increasingly isolating itself from the labor movement.”

In another blow to Mr. Biden, the signatories are slamming his request for billions of dollars of wartime aid for Ukraine, Israel and other national security priorities, in exchange for supporting tougher scrutiny of asylum claims by illegal immigrants. To earn back NEA’s support,  “Educators for Palestine” says Mr. Biden must “commit to a fair due process for asylum-seekers and refugees.”

The current animosity toward Israel within American labor circles is relatively new.  The movement has a decades-long history of supporting the Jewish state. In the 1920s and 1940s, Israel’s trade union center, Histadrut, received millions of dollars in donations from American unions. In the subsequent few decades, American labor leaders were quick to support Israel whenever it went to war with neighboring Arab states.

Yet dissent grew with the Palestinian uprising, the First Intifada, beginning in the late 1980s, when unionizers likened Israel to South Africa under its apartheid regime. The New York City group, Labor for Palestine, launched in the wake of 9/11, and the Palestinian-led global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement sprung up a year later. This signaled the start of a new anti-Israel consensus among labor unionizers that underlies the emerging hostility toward Mr. Biden today. 

“Supporting him when he is not only funding but also sending weapons killing my people sends me the message that we don’t matter,” a Palestinian American high school teacher who’s a member of NEA’s Illinois Education Association, Rahaf Othman, told The Nation, “and that we are collateral damage and that’s OK.”

“Educators for Palestine” already pressured one of its local councils, the National Council of Urban Education Associations, to issue a statement calling upon NEA leadership to “support a cease-fire in Occupied Palestine and Israel” and asking Mr. Biden and Congress to do that same. 

“As labor leaders, we must call on our government to be accountable to the people,” a fifth-grade teacher and NEA board member, Aaron Phillips, wrote in the statement, “and the US government uniquely can end the current escalation of violence against innocent people in Palestine and Israel.”