THREE

If history repeats itself, first as tragedy, twice as farce, what are we to make of so-called Somerville Divestment Project's (SPD) latest failed attempt to drag the Middle East conflict into the city of Somerville for the third year in a row?

This round, the SPD can hardly claim that they were denied access to the voters. In fact, taking advantage of lenient requirements to put non-binding questions onto the ballot of a state district, they hand-picked a single district (the Middlesex 27^th with its high concentration of progressive voters who SDP felt would most likely to respond to their message) to maximize their advantage at the polls. This choice (and the parallel choice to avoid other Somerville districts) demonstrates the organization's desire to only target voters they felt they had the greatest chance of winning over.

SPD also worked mightily to word their questions - notably Question #5 regarding Right of Return - to sound like generic, human-rights questions regarding every refugee in the world, with the Palestinians mentioned almost as a casual aside.

Again and again, their campaign literature, letters to the editors and canvassing messages made incorrect claims regarding the legal and historic nature of the alleged "right of return" (see Return 1 and Return 2, releasing tiny, tasty sound-bytes which they knew could only be countered with a careful explanation that defied fitting onto a bumper sticker.

Finally, while the group will always complain that they were buried by the limitless financial resources of their Jewish (whoops! I mean Zionist) opponents, in fact 2006 saw campaigns on both sides backed by comparable resources. SDP countered our side's pair of district-wide voter mailers with (1) 15,000 color handouts distributed throughout the district, (2) their own mail piece, and (3) multiple robocalls to households throughout the city. Beyond these modest expenses for both of us, all other campaign efforts on both sides were human (writing letters to the papers, getting volunteers to the polls, etc.), and thus time-consuming but cost free.

And still they lost.

Not just lost, but lost big. On divestment, the issue in which SC-SPD had invested over three years of effort in "educating" (read: propagandizing) voters, those voters turned down divestment by more than 2:1. And even right of return (the issue in which the group invested almost all of their time and effort this year, and issue they did everything in their power to make seem as generic and innocent as possible) only landed 39% of the vote. And this was in a district that voted 65% in favor of another non-binding resolution on international affairs: a call to withdraw from Iraq. Given this, Somerville citizen's rejection of Questions #5 (refugees) and #6 (divestment) was not a statement by voters that the citizens should avoid voting on international issues. Rather, the defeat of #5 and #6 was a clear statement that the voters rejected the specific questions posed by SPD.

Not that SC-SPD, like every other political group, is not entitled to their constitutional right to spin the results. "Way to Go Somerville: 45% for Right of Return" read an SDP sign a week after the election (giving themselves another six points by not counting blank ballots on the issue, and ignoring the fact that the district they chose for a face-off on the issue constituted only half of the city).

Yet more egregious than these numbers is the nature of this spin. Having spent the entire campaign working tirelessly to explain that Question #5 was in support of all refugees, everywhere (including, one presumes, the 800,000 Jews kicked out of Arab lands after the 1948 Arab-Israeli War), their spin on the Election Day result was that each and every Somerville voter who said yes to their generic question was, in fact, fully supportive of the more honest message they are now pushing: that Israeli is a racist apartheid state, guilty of ethnic cleansing and suitable for economic sanction, if not complete destruction.

That said, how can I know that Yes voters don't, in fact, support this, the real SDP position? Well we do have one critical data set. Simultaneous with their election drive, SDP also used another legal maneuver to force Somerville's aldermen to hold a meeting on SDP's right of return issue (a little-used provision in the city's charter forces the aldermen to hold such a hearing if petitioned by 50 voters). While SDP originally hoped that this meeting would take place before the election (and thus give them free publicity), the meeting ended up scheduled for after November 7^th, which is why it was quickly recast as a response to "45% of Somerville" allegedly saying Yes to Right of Return.

In the week between the election and this meeting, the SDP used the same robocall program used during the campaign to ask voters in the district to flock to City Hall for this event, delivering a message far more honest than what they told voters before the election:

"the City of Somerville is holding a special meeting on the right of return where local Palestinians will through photos and maps show how Zionists ethnically cleansed a million Arabs."

Putting aside that the City of Somerville was holding this meeting (on an issue having nothing to do with the city) only because they were forced to do so by the owners of that robocaller gadget, how did this siren's call to SDP's alleged supporters throughout the district work out? How many of the thousands of voters who had allegedly given the group their moral victory turned out for this "historic event?"

Well, if you look at this picture and this one, you'll notice some striking similarities between group #1 (those who showed up to the aldermen's meeting) and group #2 (members of the SDP picketing in front of City Hall months before the election). Point of fact, if you subtract long-time SDP members and supporters, the aldermen (who were forced to take part) and a few people from our side (who decided to meet up at City Hall before going out for some victory beers), SDP's robocall to their army of supporters yielded exactly zero results.

Think about those automated phone calls for a moment. Before an election, the use of such technology (while annoying) is certainly legitimate since campaigners have no idea of where voters stand on an issue and thus hope to sway them with this high-tech technique of delivering a campaign message. Using the same technology after the election, however, only makes sense if SDP truly believed, in their heart of hearts, that the city was teeming with people ready to pick up a torch and march with them on City Hall, forcing Right of Return to become the issue de jeur, if not the law of the land. Seeing this type of behavior, I cannot accuse the group of simply acting cynically. In fact, only people who deeply believe their own propaganda, only those truly in the grip of a fantasy that they were at the vanguard of a great movement with the Somerville "masses" behind them, would risk harassing voters after the election, even if 100% no shows would demonstrate the emptiness of their ranks.

In many ways, the citizens of Somerville (and the city itself) never played more than a bit part in the divestment and now right of return political sagas. Point of fact, SC-SDP is neither a grassroots movement, nor an international conspiracy. Rather, they are the latest regrouping of the 100 or so anti-Israel extremists in the city whose entire political identity is built around antipathy to the Jewish state. This core group frequently breaks apart and reorganizes, splitting and forming along political lines that parallel disputes in the Middle East (right-left, Islamic-secular) or around specific tactics like divestment.

These fluid organizations in turn are linked (often temporarily) to other organizations in region, the country or the world. Thus, SDP (which began in 2004 with Somerville-Cambridge as its focal point) in 2005 became a wholly owned subsidiary of the New England Committee to Defend Palestine or One Palestine, a group whose fanaticism far outpaces its political acumen (which explains the SDP's petition-drive fiasco last year).

This year, the end of divestment as a campaign issue and the rise of "right of return" parallels the fall in popularity of a group called the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) which, in addition to killing Rachel Corrie, specialize in campus and church-based divestment programs. With the failure of those projects, a new group called Al-Awda (which provides the ammunition for right of return campaigns) has been in the ascendancy.

The point of this political anthropology is not to pinpoint a global conspiracy, but to explain the world in which SC-SDP actually lives, a world where the voters of Somerville are useful only in their ability to help SDP members prove their chops to members of ISM, Al Awda or other similar organizations most Somervillians have never heard of.

Why do they come back year in and year out, even after being rejected by every political leader, every newspaper and now, the voters of the most progressive district in the city (if not the country)? Even after their antics have helped spell the doom for divestment in municipalities, the first domino which led to the end of divestment overall in the US?

To understand this, you must remember that they are not running their campaigns for the benefit of the city, nor are they even doing it for the Palestinians in whose names they claim to speak. Rather, this group is taking this action for the benefit of themselves: to help impress fellow activist in other states and other countries, to convince themselves that they are far-seeing revolutionaries at the forefront of an army that consists of more than the two dozen people that always seem to turn up at their meetings.

At the end of the alderman's meeting (that I attended in street cloths, having been talked out of wearing a gorilla costume), I had one of those weird moments that seem to occur whenever I'm near SDP members when they've lost another round. A dainty woman with a pained expression on her face ask me whether, "as a Jew" I could listen to the other side's story, whether "as a Jew" I could find it within myself to feel sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, whether "as a Jew" I had room in my heart to feel for the suffering masses for whom I presume she thought she was speaking.

I didn't have the heart to tell her that (not "as a Jew," but as someone who has read and written a few things on the subject), I understood the Palestinian story five times better than she ever would. Or that, "as a Jew" I understand the imperative within our faith to repair the world (Tikkun Olam), but that this did not require me to unthinkingly and wholeheartedly join their movement to slander the Jewish state, just so I could reap the reward of dozens of people continually telling me what a good Jew I was. Such behavior strikes me not as a great gift of the heart, but as the most abject selfishness, especially given the misery it ultimately promises Arabs (and Jews) who choose to pursue the propaganda vs. the peace option, just so that they can go around feeling good about themselves.

Some thoughts I just needed to get off my chest. A more gracious finale to close, next time at Somerville Middle East Justice.