On Wed, 22 Dec 2004 09:41:27 -0800 (GMT-08:00), Denise Provost wrote: > Thank you for contacting me to voice your opposition to the Divestment Resolution, which was recently before the Somerville Board of Aldermen. I have received close to a thousand telephone calls, letters, and email messages on the subject, which has slowed down my response time considerably. I do feel that I owe you the explanation of my position that many of you have asked for; I thank you for your patience in awaiting it. > > I was amazed, when the Divestment Resolution first came before our eleven-member board, that eight of my other colleagues had signed on as co-sponsors. I personally thought that the original resolution needed work on both form and substance. For instance, despite much rhetoric about "the City of Somerville's investments," it is not the city, but the Somerville Retirement Board, which has investments in Israel bonds, in Caterpillar, Inc., and in other companies producing military equipment. The Retirement Board is a quasi-autonomous body governed by state law, not by the aldermen. > > Yet I agreed to co-sponsor the Resolution for discussion in our Board, because I am a member of that retirement system, and because I believed it right to make a public statement about the two important ideas at the heart of that original Resolution. The first regards the oppressive nature of the Occupation. Whatever the Occupation may once have been, it has clearly reached a point where it has produced not only a humanitarian crisis in Palestine, but a threat to the security and stability of Israel. > > 1) Is it "anti-Israel" to oppose the Occupation? > > A year ago, four former heads of Israel's chief domestic anti-terrorism agency, "denounced virtually every major military and political tactic of the Sharon administration," in an interview with Israel's largest Hebrew-language daily newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth. According to the 11/15/2003 Boston Globe, "[t]he four, who headed the Shin Bet security agency from 1980 to 2000 under governments that spanned the political spectrum, said that Israel must end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza...." Around the same time, 27 Israeli Air Force pilots, "considered the most elite servicemen of the Israeli Defense Forces, pledged in an open letter published yesterday that they would no longer take part in raids on Palestinian population centers in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, describing them as 'illegal and immoral.'" (Boston Globe, 9/25/03) > > Increasing numbers of young Israeli men are refusing military service. These "refuseniks" now represent a broad cross-section of Israeli society. The nephew of former Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has mostly been in prison since 1999 because of such a refusal; he has become one of Amnesty International's prisoners of conscience (see: http://web.amnesty.org/web/web.nsf/pages/iot_co_jonathan) > > In an October 8, 2004, interview with the Israeli publication Ha'aretz, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's senior advisor, Dov Weisglass, was asked about Sharon's much-lauded "pull out" from the Gaza Strip. Speaking with evident candor, Weisglass replied that, "The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process....It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians." Commenting on "Sharon's Deceit and U.S. complicity," Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of the U.S. publication Tikkun, stated that "[t]he proposal for a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was hailed by the White House as an "advance" for peace when actually it was a clever move to stop any pressure for a Road Map, a Geneva Accord, or anything else that would get Israel out of the West Bank." (for both Ha'aretz interview and commentary, see: www.tikkun.org ) > > Former Shin Bet chief (1980-1986) Avraham Shalom has said, "We must once and for all admit that there is another side, that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we [Israelis] are behaving disgracefully." Major General Ami Ayalon, who headed Shin Bet from 1996 until 2000, and whose peace petition has been signed by tens of thousands in Israel and Palestine has said, "We are taking sure and measured steps to a point where the state of Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people." > It is becoming apparent that the policies of the Sharon government not only fail to represent the left in Israel, but also exclude the center, and the less extreme parts of the right - and since I don't support the extreme right in my own country, why would I consider supporting it elsewhere? > > Remarking on recent assaults on civilians by Palestinian bombers and by the Israeli army, Rabbi Michael Lerner has written that, "none of these deaths would be happening if the people of the US were to use our immense power to force Israel and the Palestinians to accept the Geneva Accord and end this senseless struggle, instead of cheering on one side and demonizing the other....NOW is the time to end all of those killings. NOW. And that means, demanding of the media and of those who seek our votes from whatever party that they must stop giving Israel a blank check to continue the Occupation, since the Occupation is not in the interests of Israel, the Jewish people, or of the United States." www.tikkun.org > > 2) Discerning my moral duty regarding the Occupation > > How can I ignore the call to do something concrete to change, in even a small way, US public policy toward the Occupation? I am, in a small way, a policy maker, an elected official, and, significantly, a member of a retirement system that is invested in the Occupation. Many of you have asked whether I think the situation in Israel/Palestine is comparable to apartheid in South Africa, and I've told you, not particularly. While acknowledging that historical situations always have their differences, and are never identical, I have to say that the example that keeps coming to my mind is the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland. > > I recently spent some time reading about the Troubles. As I've re-examined them, and felt relief in their absence, I was struck by the total mortality figure for the post-1967 era: over 3,500 dead, over half of those, civilians - many of those killed by IRA bombs exploding in pubs or shops outside of Ireland, in England and elsewhere in Europe. 9/11 mortality levels, over a longer time frame - and why? > > After a few numbing hours reading chronicles of the period, from partisans of all stripes, as well as "objective observers," I concluded that, at a certain point, it stops mattering, "who started it," what happened before 1967, and who did what things, in what order, after 1967. It doesn't matter that British military forces originally were sent into Ireland to protect the Catholics from the Protestants. It's no longer a question of fixing blame on Ian Paisley's stubborn bigotry, or Margaret Thatcher's intransigence, or the callous violence of the IRA. When there's a hideous bloodbath going on, all that really matters is that anyone in a position to help end it has a moral obligation to do so. > > 3) Could divestment help end the Occupation and bring a just peace? > > The answer to this question obviously depends on what one means by "divestment;" it also raises the second key point of the original Divestment Resolution: the possibility of investing public pension funds to promote peace and justice. The original Resolution dealt with three separate kinds of investment, and I analyzed each kind differently, both before and as a result of the public hearing and comments. I will treat each separately here. > > A) Divestment from companies that produce weaponry > > Initially, this was the easiest principle of the Resolution for me to embrace, as I believe that there are already too many weapons in the world. I have my personal retirement account in a "social index" fund that won't invest in weapons companies, and I think the world would be a better place if public pension funds did the same. I'm not alone in this opinion, either; here are words from the first successful Republican presidential candidate whose election I can remember: > > "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." (Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech given April 16, 1953) > > After the public hearing and some research, however, I concluded that this provision was the least realistic part of the original resolution. Public retirement systems in Massachusetts have a legal duty to yield an annual return of at least 8.5%. They are, appropriately, heavily regulated by the state; the state alone has the power to restrict their investments. > > Interestingly, two existing laws governing public retirement systems, which are still "on the books" in 2004, do restrict investments in weaponry: Chapter 32 of the Massachusetts General Laws, section 23(2)(g)(iii) states that, "[N]o new investment of funds shall be made in any bank or financial institution which directly or through any subsidiary has outstanding loans to any individual corporation engaged in the manufacture, distribution, or sale of firearms, munitions, including rubber bullets, tear gas, armored vehicles, or military aircraft for use or development in any activity in Northern Ireland, and no new investment of funds shall be made in he stocks, securities, or other obligations of any company so engaged." > > Section 23(2)(g)(ii) of the same Chapter 32 contains an identically-worded provision relating to "firearms, munitions,...or military aircraft for use or development in any activity in South Africa...." (tacked on to the end of this section is the restriction against investments in tobacco companies, which the gentleman from the Retirement Board mentioned at the public hearing.) Together, these two sections reveal both a precedent for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts restricting investments of public retirement systems in what might be loosely called 'civil war zones,' and show by what legal mechanism such restrictions may be imposed - not by the Somerville Board of Aldermen. > > B) Caterpillar, Inc. > > Even before the public hearing process, I didn't consider that the Retirement Board would be engaging in meaningful "divestment" if it simply sold stocks without explaining to the corporation involved the reasons for withdrawing funds. After the public hearing, it was clear that the Retirement Board would be selling no shares of any stock, based on any resolution of the Board of Aldermen. Before the hearing, I also wondered, how responsible could Caterpillar really be, if some of its machines were misused? > > After the hearing, I became convinced of Caterpillar's corporate culpability for the wicked acts against civilians, and of the importance of the Board of Aldermen taking some action to hold Caterpillar accountable. Ironically, the most logical way to do so seemed not to "divest," but to use the Retirement Board's investment in Caterpillar to call for accountability, as other stockholders have already started to do, by signing on to a shareholder's petition, asking Caterpillar to determine whether its sale of equipment to the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) comports with its own Code of Worldwide Business Conduct. > > The case against Caterpillar has been documented by groups such as the Israeli Committee against Home Demolitions, and B'tselem: The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories(for the latter's new report: Unprecedented Destruction of Palestinian Homes: Punitive House Demolitions Double the Official Reports, go to: http://www.betselem.org.il/English/Press_Releases/2004/041115.asp > Respected international organizations such as Amnesty International: http://web.amnesty.org/ai.nsf/recent/MDE151492002!Open > and Human Rights Watch have also compiled substantial evidence of the misuse of Caterpillar machines to destroy homes agricultural resources, and infrastructure. The recent Human Rights Watch report, "Razing Rafah: Mass Home Demolitions in the Gaza Strip," was evidently mailed to me within the public comment period on Divestment, but did not, unfortunately, arrive until after the final vote was taken. > > Before the December 7, 2004, Legislative Matters Committee Meeting, I drafted an alternate resolution for the Aldermen to consider as a substitute for the original Divestment Resolution. I had tried to respond to legitimate criticisms of the original resolution, while retaining some action items, which would move the Board of Aldermen, and the Retirement Board, if it chose to comply, away from the status quo. A request that the Retirement Board join the Caterpillar Shareholders' petition was one of the two action items in my "Resolution Regarding Peace and Justice in Israel/Palestine." > > The California-based group Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as several Christian religious groups, get credit for developing the idea of the Caterpillar shareholder's petition. The beauty of the shareholder's petition is that it would allow retirement boards in Massachusetts to bring pressure against human rights abuses in a way that is not inconsistent with state law. It's not "divestment," but could easily turn out to be a better thing than mere divestment in shares would be. > > C) Israel bonds > > Initially, the Retirement Board investment about which I felt least certain of the need to divest was the Israel bond. With a face value of $250,000.00, coming to maturity in March of 2005, the bond seemed too slight to amount to an economic sanction, and so close to term as to be almost a moot point. "Divesting," in this case most of all, would be an act of pure symbolism, and I wondered if the "positive" symbolism actually outweighed the "negative" symbolism. > > Again, it was the public hearing process that convinced me that it is valuable and important to refrain from any further investment in Israel bonds until Israel again embraces the peace process. Interestingly, the largest portion of the advocacy in favor of divestment came from Israelis, from Israeli-Americans, and from American Jews, which was both unexpected and particularly persuasive. In consideration of powerful arguments (and my own belief) that public retirement boards should not invest in any countries violating human rights, my Resolution asked the Somerville Retirement Board not to invest new funds in the bonds of any foreign nation. > > 4) What Happened in the Somerville Board of Aldermen? > > During the four week public hearing and comment period, even as I became more certain that the Board should take a stand against the Occupation, and in support socially responsible investment principles, support for the original Divestment Resolution dwindled among my fellow Board members. At the December 7 Legislative Matters Committee meeting, it seemed clear that few Alderman still supported taking any position on Israel/Palestine. I made a motion to place the Divestment Resolution "on file," a kind of formal inaction. I won't go into the parliamentary details, but the Board violated at least one of its own Rules in its rush to vote down the Divestment Resolution in committee instead. > > At the meeting of the full Board on December 9, 2004, I voted, with my colleagues, to accept the December 7 Committee Report. Immediately after that vote, there was a motion made from the floor that the Board impose a "gag rule," placing "on file" without even a reading four alternate resolutions on Israel/Palestine, three introduced by me, and one introduced by another alderman. The "gag rule" was adopted by a vote of 8 to 3, over my strenuous arguments that the other resolutions be considered; in protest, I asked for reconsideration of the acceptance of the Committee Report, and changed my vote. > > If you would like me to email you a copy of my alternative resolution, let me know. I also hope some time in future to make the immense public record of comment on this issue more widely available, it is fascinating reading, and very moving. > > It is hard to tell from many emails I've received whether you are local or not. If who are, I encourage you to follow what else is happening in Somerville city politics. > > Please consider me as, Pro Israel, Pro Palestine, Pro Peace > > Best regards, > Denise Provost > Alderman-at-Large > City of Somerville > denise@provost-citywide.org > http://www.provost-citywide.org

Dear Ms. Provost,

Thank for your response. I also consider myself "Pro Israel, Pro Palestine, Pro Peace", and while I'd suggest that virtually every issue you raise has multiple other sides of which you seem to be unaware, I don't want to get into a point by point rebuttal.

As a Somerville resident, I would like to make two points, though:

1) Whatever the merits of your proposal might be when considered in a vacuum, you seem to be completely oblivious of the implications of singling out Israel from the rest of the world as the focus of economic retaliation.

2) I have no desire to see the Somerville city government turned into a debating society for assaults on one side or another of every ethnically charged debate in the world. The diversity and good nature of the city are two of its great assets, and I would hate to see that overturned because a handful of residents thought they could gain a brief advantage by using the Aldermen as a club for their pet cause. Was this really a precedent you wanted to set? I would much prefer that the city pick up my garbage and fill my potholes. If you wish to influence foreign policy, write to Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice, like I do.