St. Louis Says ‘Not Another Nickel’ to Companies Complicit in Gaza Genocide

A new grassroots effort is challenging the city to strip companies such as Boeing and ICL of tax exemptions.

A diverse coalition has come together in St. Louis to oppose tax exemptions granted to weapons manufacturers. Launched in March 2025 under the banner “Not Another Nickel,” the coalition argues that tax exemptions for these manufacturers rob St. Louis of funding for schools and infrastructure, contribute to local pollution, and fuel foreign wars. The coalition’s targets include companies accused of manufacturing weapons that have been used to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians since Israel began its genocide in Gaza in October 2023.

The campaign is led by the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee, which succeeded in mobilizing the St. Louis Board of Aldermen to pass a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza in January 2024. Elior Berkowitz, a member of St. Louis Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), a coalition partner, says the new effort is “about making a statement that this ceasefire city does not want to support apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, and also that it won’t give its resources to companies that profit from or participate in human rights abuses and environmental destruction.” Other campaign partners include the St. Louis chapters of Democratic Socialists of America, the Green Party, and CodePink.

One of Not Another Nickel’s highest profile targets is Boeing. In March 2025, President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. Air Force had selected the company to build the next-generation F-47 fighter jet. Boeing plans to develop the warplanes in St. Louis County, at a facility about 15 miles from downtown St. Louis. The county granted Boeing about $155 million in tax breaks for the project.

Berkowitz says that even before Boeing landed the new contract, the specter of its involvement in the war on Gaza hung over St. Louis. From 2021 to 2023, the company was the top U.S. provider of guided bombs and munitions to Israel. The Israeli Occupation Forces also purchase Boeing fighter jets.

“Last year, I broke down crying when I was driving to the airport to welcome Rahaf, a 2-year-old child amputee who lost her legs in Gaza when Israel bombed her home,” says Berkowitz, who was brought to tears when they drove past a Boeing facility on their way to the airport and wondered, “Who’s to say it wasn’t a jet made there that dropped the bomb that caused Rahaf to lose her legs?”

ICL Group, another target of Not Another Nickel, also has strong ties to Israel and has been implicated in its recent attacks on Gaza and the wider region. The chemicals and specialty minerals manufacturer was founded as an Israeli government-owned entity in 1968. At the time, ICL was an acronym for the company’s full name, Israel Chemicals Limited. Now, ICL Group is a publicly traded company with a shortened official name, and its majority shareholder is the Israel Corporation. That holding company is Israel’s largest and has long been a target of Palestinian human rights advocates due to its role in the occupation.

Last year, ICL Group began developing a new electric-vehicle battery-component manufacturing facility in north St. Louis. For the new plant, the St. Louis Planned Industrial Expansion Authority granted ICL Group tax abatements valued at more than $8 million. An unelected board of just three members voted on the tax abatements on Nov. 19, 2024. The company received similar tax abatements for a prior development in Carondelet, a neighborhood in south St. Louis.

Organizers with the Not Another Nickel campaign, as well as accountability groups, allege that phosphates manufactured at ICL Group’s Carondelet facility are used in the production of white phosphorus munitions, a chemical weapon that Israel has dropped on Gaza and southern Lebanon hundreds of times since October 2023. Some of those munitions were manufactured in the U.S, according to investigations by Amnesty International and The Washington Post. Some came from Pine Bluff Arsenal in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, which sources phosphates from ICL Group in St. Louis, according to The Corruption Tracker, a research group that tracks the global arms trade.

Israel’s white phosphorus attacks have drawn widespread condemnation from rights groups. The chemical, which burns at temperatures of up to 1,500 degrees, causes severe and often fatal injuries. Environmental organizations have also cautioned that white phosphorus attacks can have long-term adverse effects on agricultural production, water quality, and biodiversity.

Amira al-Badri, a St. Louis–based Palestinian American who is using a pseudonym to protect her identity, says many of her neighbors seem not to realize that companies operating in the city profit from the violence in Palestine. “It’s so heartbreaking, and it’s so, so polarizing,” she says. “It’s really difficult to be a Palestinian in this space. We watch the news, we hear stories from our family members in Palestine, and then I leave my house and meet people who live in a completely different world, a completely different reality.”

Al-Badri welcomed news of the Not Another Nickel campaign, which recognizes the adverse effects of weapons manufacturing in St. Louis on communities at home and abroad. “There’s so much work that needs to be done locally,” she says. “To turn a blind eye to our own people here, and turn a blind eye to the damage we’re inflicting on other people across the globe—it’s disgusting.”

Organizers with Not Another Nickel highlight the need for investment in schools, infrastructure, housing, and health care in St. Louis. “Schools are the biggest losers when it comes to these incentives being given to these companies,” explains Emanuel Taranu, a campaign organizer. Because property taxes fund public schools in St. Louis, exempting multibillion-dollar companies from those taxes hurts students.

One analysis of St. Louis and St. Louis County public school districts found that economic development tax abatements like those ICL Group has been granted cost schools in those districts more than a quarter of a billion dollars between 2017 and 2022. The tax abatements harmed Black students disproportionately, amounting to an average loss of $610 in education funding per Black student per year.

The St. Louis Development Corporation, which houses and staffs the board that granted ICL Group’s tax abatements and claims it is “focused on equitable and inclusive economic development,” declined to answer questions for this article.

The movement to end tax abatements for weapons manufacturers in St. Louis has found powerful allies in environmental justice organizations concerned about Boeing and ICL Group’s adverse environmental effects. A wastewater spill at Boeing’s north St. Louis plant in June 2023, which released harmful carcinogens into neighboring Coldwater Creek, proved that concerns about pollution of the city’s waterways were well founded. Now, groups including Metropolitan Congregations United’s (MCU) AirWatchSTL and Missouri Coalition for the Environment (MCE) are also raising the alarm about the manufacturers’ effects on air quality.

“Community members in Carondelet report smells and that they definitely feel the impacts on air quality that the ICL facility has brought,” says Beth Gutzler, lead environmental justice organizer at MCU. Gutzler says she questions why officials continue to grant permits to so many industrial facilities in St. Louis when the region is already overburdened with polluters. Both St. Louis and St. Louis County’s repeated failures to meet ambient air quality standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency landed them on a list of “serious” offenders in December 2024.

The situation in north St. Louis, where ICL Group is building its electric-vehicle battery-component manufacturing plant, could prove even more worrisome. For starters, it is slated to be built “within blowing distance” of settling bins used to treat St. Louis’ drinking water, says Maxine Gill, MCE’s policy coordinator, meaning that contaminants emitted by the plant could make their way into the city’s water.

Gill also says the area where the new plant will be built, which is home to majority-Black and low-income neighborhoods, has long been treated like a “sacrifice zone.” St. Louis and St. Louis County used to impose racial restrictions on property sales, which segregated Black communities in neighborhoods near dangerous industries in the north. Even after the Supreme Court outlawed racial zoning, the practice continued in less official ways. Today, St. Louis’s Black residents, particularly those in the north, disproportionately shoulder the burden of environmental hazards, including lead poisoning and air pollution. “Because of the placement of the facility, it’s just this extremely egregious example of an environmental injustice,” says Gill.

Residents are particularly concerned about the new plant after hearing about explosions at a battery recycling plant in Fredericktown, Missouri, in October 2024, and a battery-storage plant in Monterey County, California, in January 2025. “They want to know that this is going to be safe, and so far, ICL has not gone through any effort to prove to the community that this is safe,” says Gill.

Berkowitz, the JVP organizer, says that the Not Another Nickel campaign partnering with environmental groups is not only a matter of coalition building, it is also an acknowledgement that the struggles for Palestinian human rights and environmental justice cannot be separated. “[It] is rooted in an understanding that Palestinian liberation is essential to all our liberation, and that’s materially obvious when it comes to the war and death industry that exploits us here to kill abroad.”