Sign on to Demilitarize Portland to Palestine's Open Letter to Oregon’s Congressional Delegation to drop the NSO investment! View the letter below:

Dear members of the Oregon congressional delegation,

We, the undersigned, urge you to join U.S. Senator Ron Wyden in calling on the Oregon Investment Council to divest from NSO Group, the Israeli spyware firm that the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden recently blacklisted due to its human rights abuses.

We further call upon you to endorse a statement issued by your colleagues, including Senator Wyden and House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff, to sanction NSO and other spyware firms under the Global Magnitsky Act.

We also urge you to recognize that the NSO Group is not a private company but is “directly supervised,” as the New York Times put it, by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, which must approve the company’s export licenses. Thus, the human rights violations that have been thoroughly documented are the joint responsibility of NSO and the Israeli government, which receives $3.8 billion a year in aid from the U.S. government.
We particularly wish to call your attention to the fact that NSO spyware was used to target Palestinian human rights groups and that the spyware industry in Israel tests its products on Palestinians to conduct mass surveillance of a stateless people living under military occupation.

We ask that you use your political influence to convince the Oregon state legislature, the Oregon treasurer, and the Oregon Investment Council to implement a “human rights screen” so that bad investments like the one in NSO never happen again. It is plainly clear that the OIC’s imprudent decision to invest $230 million in an untested, startup private equity fund will likely lead to significant losses for the Oregon Public Employee Retirement System (PERS) as the NSO Group faces bankruptcy, loss of credit recommendation, and dissolution.
Finally, in light of the fact that Human Rights Watch, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, and numerous Palestinian rights organizations have found that Israel operates an apartheid regime in violation of international law, we urge that you demand withholding aid to Israel until apartheid is ended and Palestinians enjoy full democratic rights, an end to military occupation, and the right of refugee return. The Global Magnitsky Act should also be applied to any Israel government official or citizen found to have taken part in the human rights violations cited in the Act.

Yours, the undersigned Oregon taxpayers and residents.