As parents, families, youth, and community members living in Providence and Rhode Island, we call on the Providence Children's Museum to cut its funding relationships with weapons manufacturers Textron and Electric Boat, which have provided weapons to Israel that have killed at least 11,500 children in Gaza since October 7, 2023. [1] The Museum cannot claim to be committed to its mission of inspiring “lifelong learning for all through play, creativity, and exploration” without acknowledging that Palestinian children must be part of that all. Palestinian children must be allowed to play, to create, to explore. Palestinian children must be allowed to live. The Museum serves children; its funders kill children.  

When Israel's escalated attacks on Gaza began in October, almost half of Gaza's population was under the age of 18. [2] The children who have died since then include 260 babies under the age of one, as well as countless babies, toddlers, youth, and teenagers under the age of 18. [1] By accepting donations from these weapons manufacturers, The Providence Children's Museum is also complicit in the genocide of tens of thousands of children and adults in Gaza.

Over the past 2 years alone, the Museum accepted at least $15,000 from Textron, Inc. and at least $10,000 from Electric Boat's Employee Community Services Association. [3] Textron, a weapons manufacturer headquartered in Providence, provides the Israeli Air Force with aircraft for bombing residential buildings and firing missiles at civilian targets. [4] Textron has provided grant funding to the Museum since at least 2017. Electric Boat is a subsidiary of General Dynamics, the fifth-largest military company in the world, which supplies the Israeli military with bombs, technologies for fighter jets and armored combat vehicles, and weapons systems and components for warplanes. [5] These are just two of many companies that take in billions of dollars every year from contracts with the Israeli military that are funded by US aid packages to Israel. The US government and US weapons manufacturers enable and profit off genocidal violence in Gaza and Palestine. [6]

Israeli and Zionist violence toward Palestinian children and communities is not new. The Israeli settler colony was established through the dispossession, displacement, massacring, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. [7] [8] Since 1948, Israel has persistently violated international law and failed to comply with hundreds of UN resolutions condemning its colonial and discriminatory policies. In 2005, recognizing the failure of "all forms of international intervention and peace-making" to end Israeli settler colonial violence, Palestinian civil society called for "international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world" to impose boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) on the Israeli apartheid regime and all who do business with it. [9] Inspired by South African anti-apartheid resistance and tactics, BDS is grounded in the belief that global collective action can alter the course of history. The call for BDS, now as much as it has ever been, is a call for conscience, justice, and people's solidarity in the face of genocide.

If the Museum is truly committed to "lifelong learning," it must reckon with the deep violence of its complicity in genocide and the contradiction of its mission. The call to divest is a call to recognize the complicity of even our most beloved cultural institutions in racial colonial violence around the world. The Providence Children's Museum may not manufacture weapons, but in accepting donations from companies that do, the PCM manufactures consent among its patrons to allow the unfolding genocide in Gaza to continue. 

The Museum is not alone in its ties to weapons manufacturers -- we know that many other community institutions have also accepted blood money from Textron and Electric Boat. As just a few of many other local examples, the Providence Performing Arts Center (PPAC) has received funding from the Textron Charitable Trust for over 22 years [10] and the Roger Williams Park Zoo has featured a Textron-sponsored pavilion since at least 2008 [11]. Collective accountability and divestment will require many steps, and as the community you serve, we urge you to take these first crucial measures. We demand that the Providence Children's Museum:

1. Refuse any and all donations from or affiliated with Textron, Electric Boat, and all other weapons manufacturers. 
2. Cut all present and future ties or affiliations with Textron, Electric Boat, and all other weapons manufacturers, including their participation on the Board of Directors.
3. Commit to the broader Boycotts, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement and use its position and connections to pressure other cultural institutions in Rhode Island to do the same.

Until the Providence Children's Museum recognizes that the liberation of the children it claims to serve is inextricably linked to the liberation of Palestine and Palestinian children, it will continue to legitimate the cherishing of some children and the perishing of many others. 

In solidarity,

Rhode Island for Palestinian Liberation (RIPL) — a collective of Rhode Island-based organizations and individuals committed to the fight for a free and decolonized Palestine