CONSEQUENCES

Given that we don't live in the State of Florida, Tuesday's election will likely result in one of two options: victory or defeat for Questions #5 and #6, the Somerville Divestment Project's last best hope for convincing themselves of their relevance and significance.

If the motions lose, the SDP will be in a unique position of having been rejected or denounced by nearly every constituency in the city. To date, the in-your-face tactics and thinly veiled bigotry of the group has managed to insult or alienate the legislative (Aldermen), executive (Mayor) and judicial (Justice Houston) branches of government. Both city papers have vehemently called for a NO vote on #5 and #6, as has the leadership of the city's retirement board (the institution being asked to divest in Israel), both candidate's for governor (Patrick and Healey), Somerville's congressman, and even a former Presidential candidate for the Green Party. (A summary of their thoughts can be found here. If the voters reject the group, the SDP will have managed the seemingly impossible task of uniting a city which has not agreed on anything since the early days of the Roosevelt administration (Teddy Roosevelt, that is).

Yet even if one or both of the questions pass, the political landscape divestment advocates face in 2006 is quite different than the one in which they operated two years ago. Remember that 2004 was the year in which a petition drive at Harvard and MIT triggered similar anti-Israel divestment petitions in dozens of universities across the country. Numerous mainline Protestant churches (notably the Presbyterians) had passed or were considering calls to divest their retirement portfolios of investments beneficial to Israel. If divestment had passed in Somerville in either of the last two years, its sponsors would have opened another front in their global campaign to brand Israel a "racist settler state" and heir to the mantle (and stigma) of Apartheid South Africa.

Fast-forward to today and you see a divestment "movement" in ruins. Despite noise at many universities, not one school has divested itself of a single stock that benefits the Jewish state and at many schools (including Harvard), students, teachers and administrators have denounced calls for divestment and sponsored counter-petitions that outpolled pro-divestment petitions ten to one. Drives for municipal divestment essentially shut down after the Somerville debacle, and with this year's vote by the Presbyterian Church to rescind previous divestment resolutions (a 95-5 victory for anti-divestment forces), the churches - once the "movement's" institutional bastion - have gotten out of the divestment business, apparently for good.

Even the Somerville Divestment Project, an organization whose middle name is "Divestment" has soft peddled the ballot question it sponsored regarding this issue, choosing instead to focus on a second question regarding Palestinian refugees (the so-called "right of return"). The fact that divestment has proven to be such a loser is one reason why the group is taking the refugee issue out for a "test drive" at the expense of the citizens of Somerville who once again must act as props for a drama in which members of the SDP try to convince themselves (and others) that they are the vanguard of some great, revolutionary movement.

When given democratic opportunities to have their voices heard, members and leaders of civic organizations (including Harvard students and faculty, Presbyterian Church members, Somerville's alderman and, one hopes soon, its citizens) have rejected divestment by crushing margins of ten or twenty to one. This does not necessarily demonstrate that a Zionist heart secretly beats in the breast of the average Harvard student, Presbyterian, church member or Somerville citizen. However, it does point out that common people continue to show good sense (often more than their leaders) with regard to protecting organizations and communities from cynical manipulators trying to leverage noble institutions to allow divestment (or whatever this "movement" morphs into next) to punch above its own remarkably light weight.