Somerville City Council has approved a resolution to study divesting city funds from companies that do business with Israel, officially taking action on a nonbinding ballot measure approved by voters on Nov. 4.
At the council’s meeting Tuesday, councilors voted 9-2 to approve the resolution, which instructs them to draft and pass an ordinance in the next year. While members of the public who attended the meeting spoke about the impacts of the war in Gaza, most city councilors said they were chiefly concerned with following the will of the voters, who voted 55% in favor of this month’s ballot question.
“This question received more votes than the vast majority of us,” Councilor Willie Burnley Jr., who filed the resolution, told his colleagues before the vote. “It is, in my view, based on the results, the will of our community to do all that we can to ensure that our municipal funds, whether they be invested in pensions or through contracts, are serving the values of our community, that they are used to build up schools, to improve people’s lives, and not to enrich corporations that are violating human rights.”
Burnley originally filed the resolution ahead of the City Council’s Nov. 13 meeting, but it was tabled until the following meeting due to a technicality of the Open Meeting Law.
The ballot measure, known as Question 3, was sponsored by the group Somerville for Palestine. Sara Halawa, one of the group’s leaders, told the council Tuesday that she and her Palestinian-American family had been targeted locally due to their identity, including one of her young children being told not to speak about Palestine by a classmate.
“My family has experienced the most acute heartache, racism and dehumanization as leaders locally and nationally make excuses and exceptions for Israel as it commits crime after crime against the Palestinian people,” Halawa said. “All we are saying is that Palestinians deserve the same rights and freedoms as everyone else. That Palestinians too deserve life, dignity and peace.”
Mo Katz-Christy, another resident who spoke in favor of the resolution, pointed out that Somerville’s pension fund has shares in the defense company Lockheed Martin, which provides arms to Israel.
“How much can you prevent today by following the will of your constituents and voting to take our Somerville tax dollars out of genocide?” Katz-Christy said. “Refusing to support genocide is a shared Somerville value.”
Other residents, however, spoke in strong opposition to the resolution. Sam Gechter told councilors that he and other Jewish community members saw it as antisemitic and anti-Israeli, going as far as to say the movement to boycott and divest from Israel as steps toward ethnic cleansing of Jews.
“First we were hated for our religion, then we were hated for being of a lower race. Now we are hated for our nation state,” he said. “We see support for a boycott as clear support for the end of a Jewish state of Israel and support for the eventual, eventual forcible removal of half the world’s Jewish population from the only sanctuary Jews have.”
City Councilor Kristen Strezo, who voted against the resolution alongside newly sworn-in Councilor Emily Hardt, agreed that the measure was discriminatory and said she believed it would also likely turn out to be illegal. She argued that the war in Gaza had “nothing to do with our Somerville.”
“Jewish members of the community have stated that it makes us feel more targeted and more unsafe. That’s not being inclusive,” she said.
Councilor Ben Ewen-Campen, however, pointed out that the resolution does not automatically go into effect, and only called for the council to create an ordinance “in a manner that is practicable and legally feasible.”
“There is no universe in which I will support an ordinance … that violates constitutional rights, that is discriminatory based on national origin or ethnicity or religion or other protected classes, or that is illegal in some other way,” he said.
