In the YouTube video I must have watched a hundred times now, 3-year-old Ariel Bibas met his newborn brother for the first time. He strode across the courtyard to the front door, hugged his mother Shiri, and took her hand in his. Together they walked across the room to where baby Kfir was still strapped into his car seat, with Ariel’s glorious tangle of tangerine-colored curls bouncing in the reflected light. For a moment, he paused at the edge of the couch, eyes wide, taking in the new baby before him in his hospital-issue knitted cap. Kfir was sucking on his hand. The best moment is when Ariel reaches over, lightly touches baby Kfir’s right sock, and hugs the whole car seat, ever so tenderly resting his face on Kfir’s left sock and baby blanket.
On Oct. 7, 2023, Palestinian “civilians” seized the two Bibas babies and their mother and dragged them at gunpoint into the terrorist tunnels in Gaza. There, they choked and pounded the two babies to death with their bare hands, before smashing their bodies with rocks to make it look less like they had been choked to death and smashed with rocks and more like they had died from an airstrike.
This did not fool Israeli forensic pathologists.
The terrorists subsequently raped and murdered Shiri too and mutilated her body as well.
May their memories be for a blessing and may they be comforted among all the mourners of Zion.
Is it normal to hang onto babies’ corpses as trophies in your terrorist tunnels for more than 500 days?
Is it normal to stage a macabre pageant of masked terrorists to hand over two murdered babies’ coffins and then pretend to return their mother’s corpse too?
Is it normal for the Red Cross to pretend to help in the transfer of corpses and hostages?
I don’t have any idea any more.
On this same evening, when Jews around the world were grieving our losses of Ariel, Kfir, and Shiri, we Jewish members of the United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) were astonished as 0.6 percent of the union membership voted “in a landslide” to pass a viciously anti-Israel, anti-Jewish, fact-distorting resolution at its monthly assembly meeting. They did this as casually as if they were tearing off the perforated sealing strips on their W-2 forms.
The one thing I know is that I don’t need to keep paying dues for the privilege of being violently hated at close range.
Is it normal for public school teachers to celebrate sadistic acts of Jew-hate as official union policy in their monthly union meetings?
Is it normal for union members to refuse even to acknowledge the distress of their Jewish union colleagues — and our Jewish students — when our families are being targeted in ever-escalating acts of collective hate?
I don’t have any idea any more.
The one thing I do know is that I don’t need to keep paying dues for the privilege of being violently hated at close range.
As the writer Anne Lamott once wrote, “It is an act of sanity to refuse a spoonful when you know the food has been poisoned.”
Under the 2018 Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Supreme Court decision, members of a public sector union can quit their union any time without penalty — and they can also rejoin any time without fines, fees, or penalty.
On Nov. 16, 2023, UESF passed a resolution as “official union policy” that blamed Israel for the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, in which over 1,200 Israelis were slaughtered, mutilated, and tortured. The new policy aligned UESF officially with an anti-Israel political position.
At that point, the first 14 Jewish members of UESF resigned from the union.
Now, in response to the new resolution and the escalating hate and intimidation we Jewish members continue to experience in UESF, we are quitting en masse.
UESF is no longer a safe organization for mainstream Jews.
We’re joined by non-Jewish allies who are equally fed up by the divisive Jew-hate on top of the giant banana split of union incompetence that UESF members have suffered over the last few years.
Our leaders are far more committed to their glory-hunting terrorist cosplay than they are in addressing the many pay and benefit violations our 6,500 members have experienced from our employer. Highlights of their failures include:
– UESF leadership waived our rights to enforcement under the California Labor Code Section 204 that would have fined our employer for late and/or incomplete pay, which actually happened through the Empower debacle, leaving all 6,500 UESF members unprotected and without legal redress.
– UESF waived the California Education Code protections on pay in our paraprofessionals’ contract, leaving many paraprofessionals unaware that they have the right to join a class action claim against SFUSD, although the statute of limitations on these claims will expire soon.
– UESF members pay more for their family health coverage than members of the other public employee unions that have contracts with SFUSD; on average, UESF members with two dependents pay $9,000 more per year for family health coverage (employee plus 2) than those SFUSD employees in the clerical, janitorial, and building trade unions.
Between the discrimination and the incompetence, there isn’t that much to stick around for.
All of which leads to the musical question, Why on Earth are any UESF members sticking around in UESF?
Union officials will be quick to argue that they “got” us a $9,000 pay raise, but there are two problems with that argument. The first is that the $9,000 raise occurs over the life of the entire contract. The second is that it can reasonably be construed as a belated self-defense move by SFUSD, which is experiencing catastrophic losses of certificated staff to better-paying districts in the Bay Area. It’s become an open secret that SFUSD is the training ground for educators in hard-to-staff areas such as special education. Raiding our ranks has become commonplace, as wealthier districts nearby offer teachers $20,000 to $40,000 more a year than they can earn in SFUSD.
In addition to having failed to meet every basic challenge of union competence, UESF has now also completely lost its moral gyroscope.
In announcing as policy that its highest moral priority is violating the civil rights of its Jewish members and our students, UESF has prioritized hatred, bullying, and division over union solidarity.
By any reasonable modern standard, UESF is no longer a functioning union.
So we’re walking. Shalom, friends, and peace out.