Zeynep ConkarJoelle Rudney, a retired teacher with 23 years in the classroom in the US state of Virginia, describes dedicating her career to helping students become “responsible adults who would in turn try and build a better and more peaceful world”.
But the world of love and compassion she had envisaged came crashing down when she discovered that her retirement funds were being used to kill and maim innocent civilians in faraway Gaza, Lebanon and Iran.
A damning report released last week has found that the Virginia Retirement System (VRS), the US agency managing pension benefits for Virginia's public sector workers, holds a whopping $394 million in investments linked to weapons manufacturing and shipping companies supplying Israel's massacres across the Middle East.
The report, released by the VRS Divest from Weapons & War campaign, the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), and the People's Embargo for Palestine, draws on publicly available financial data and records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.
It presents the most detailed accounting to date of the VRS's exposure to the military supply chain, a fraction of the agency's $122 billion total portfolio.
The findings name some of the world's largest defence contractors.
Lockheed Martin, the single largest holding at $94.8 million, produces the F-35 fighter jet and AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, both used extensively in Israel's aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza, according to Bana Husseini, an organiser with the VRS Divest campaign and the Palestinian Youth Movement.
Other companies cited in the report include General Dynamics, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Maersk, and Thyssenkrupp, firms that either manufacture or ship weapons to Israel.
"These companies are critical in maintaining the weapons supply to Israel and the resulting massacres of thousands of people across the Middle East," Husseini tells TRT World.
Though such investments are allowed under US laws, they have come under increasing scrutiny and condemnation since the start of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians.
Activists and the public have named and shamed institutions for their complicity in the genocide.
A shock for many
For many of the Virginia public employees whose retirement savings are tied up in these investments, the report has come as a huge shock.
Learning that her pension contributions were invested in companies participating “in the bombings of hospitals, schools and houses in Gaza in attacks that have killed nearly 70,000 people, mostly civilians” has led Rudney to urge the VRS Board of Trustees to act.
“Unfortunately, so far, VRS has invested in a number of US and foreign companies like Northrop-Grumman, Maersk, Boeing, Thyssenkrupp and others that either build or ship weapons to Israel,” Rudney tells TRT World.
Casey Rosales, a county public servant who has worked in mental health services for over a decade, says she had no idea her pension contributions were being funnelled into weapons manufacturers until recently.
"As employees, we don't have a choice in where these funds are allocated," Rosales tells TRT World.
"It's difficult to reconcile the fact that while I dedicate my career to supporting and strengthening communities, the money I earn may be contributing to harm elsewhere."
That sense of contradiction runs across the workforce.
A public utilities employee, who asked to remain anonymous for safety, says a desire to serve the public good was what drew them to their career, making the fund's weapons investments to apartheid and genocide in Palestine feel like a direct betrayal of that commitment.
“It is profoundly sad that while doing work to help men, women, and children with health care services and resources here in Virginia, my tax money goes to buying and owning shares in companies contributing to genocide.”
“I demand the VRS Board of Trustees divest from these companies and commit to never again invest our future into the manufacturing of death,” the employee tells TRT World.
Husseini argues that the VRS's fiduciary framing, its stated obligation to act solely in the financial interest of beneficiaries, cannot be separated from the ethical demands of those same beneficiaries.
"Educators, administrators, civil servants, first responders, and other municipal workers who are critical to the functioning of the Commonwealth have a right to demand that their hard-earned retirement savings be invested in alignment with their ethical convictions," she says.
Doubling down
So far, the VRS has shown little sign of bending.
“The VRS has responded by dismissing the campaign's demands, arresting a firefighter for delivering the petition, inviting a notorious war criminal to their yearly retreat, and further collaborating with war profiteers,” Husseini explains.
A petition calling for divestment has nonetheless gathered nearly 4,500 signatures.
The fund's resistance is harder to justify given its own history.
The VRS divested from Russian holdings after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and cut ties with companies linked to apartheid South Africa in 1990 following an executive order by then-Governor Douglas Wilder.
Campaigners say those precedents prove divestment is possible, and that the current inaction is a choice, not a constraint.
Supporters of the campaign say they will continue pressing the Board of Trustees until it meets their demands to fully divest from the weapons supply chain to Israel.
