By Adam Pagnucco.
Last night’s meeting of the Montgomery County Education Association’s (MCEA) representative assembly produced its endorsements in the school board primaries. It also addressed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza. The resolution, proposed by a member and not by the union’s board, provoked pushback from the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington (JCRC).
In the end, MCEA did not pass the resolution. A union representative told me:
After internal conversations and review, it has been determined that the NBI [new business item] is not in order and thus it will not be considered by the RA [representative assembly]. We appreciate the deep connection that many of our members have to the people of the region, and their innate desire and efforts to support lasting peace and tranquility there.
JCRC praised the union’s failure to pass the resolution, saying that it “did the right thing.”
Montgomery County has a lot of Jewish residents and a lot of Muslim and Arab residents. That makes the politics of the Israel-Hamas war, which has resulted in tens of thousands of mostly Palestinian casualties, a dangerous thing for elected officials and organizations to navigate. The immigrant rights group CASA paid a heavy price for slamming Israel’s alleged “systematic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.” Those politics were on full display outside MCEA’s headquarters last night as the video of protestors shown below illustrates.
MCEA, which has many matters in front of state and county elected leaders, made a wise decision to stay clear of this issue.