Ballots Become Battlefields: What Somerville’s Vote Says about the Jewish Future
The Ballot That Crossed a Line
This week in Somerville, Massachusetts, voters were met with a troubling surprise on their ballots. Amid local races, they were asked if the city should sever ties with companies that support “Israel’s apartheid, genocide, and illegal occupation of Palestine.”
This was not the work of a fringe group. It was official ballot language, jarring in its drama, divisive in its intent, and utterly alien to the spirit of local governance.
A routine act of civic participation was transformed into a referendum on the very legitimacy of the Jewish state. For many Jews, myself among them, it felt less like a policy debate and more like a warning, a signal that the boundaries of fact, history, and communal loyalty are being quietly redrawn.
Weaponizing Local Democracy
Question 3 offered voters the illusion of shaping foreign policy with a symbolic, non-binding gesture. But it’s true effect was more corrosive: it bent the machinery of democracy into a tool for moral theater.
A ballot is not a soapbox; it is a legal instrument meant to guide the affairs of a city. To inject the language of apartheid and genocide into a municipal election is not to advance justice, but to sow confusion and suspicion.
These are not mere words. They are legal indictments, freighted with consequences. In Israel’s case, they are not only unfounded but serve to invert reality itself.
Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. Its Arab citizens vote, serve in government, and sit on the Supreme Court. Its population includes Jews, Muslims, Christians, Druze, and others living side by side.
To accuse Israel of genocide, even as both Israeli and Palestinian populations have grown, is not simply a factual error—it is a moral inversion that cheapens the very language of atrocity.
This is not meaningful civic participation; it’s an assault on political reality and erasure of Jewish narrative, signaling a broader threat to Jewish identity.
No Evidence, No Legal Standing, No Place on a Ballot
A city ballot is not a platform for ideological crusades. It is meant to serve the practical needs of a community.
There is no legal evidence, nor any authority, for Somerville to investigate or prohibit contracts with “companies that sustain Israel.”
What does that even mean in practice? Apple, Amazon, Pfizer, and nearly every global company are entangled with Israel in some way.
This is not about procurement. It is about pressuring citizens to lend legitimacy to accusations that have neither evidence nor jurisdiction behind them.
It is political theater, dressed in the trappings of democracy.
When Jews Forget Their Own Story
Perhaps most painful of all is that some of the voices advancing these claims are Jewish.
Across campuses, protests, and even city councils, young Jews are echoing the very language once used to delegitimize our existence: colonizer, apartheid, occupier.
Many believe they are standing for justice. But justice severed from history and memory is emptied of meaning, reduced to a slogan.
Too many young Jews were never taught the foundational story of Israel, why it exists, how it came to be, and what it has meant for our people across generations.
Without that inheritance, they are left exposed to narratives that cast Israel as something to be opposed, rather than cherished.
But it is not only the young who have forgotten. Some older Jews, those who should know better, have chosen to embrace narratives that flatter their sense of moral superiority, casting themselves as champions of the underdog, even when that underdog calls for their destruction. They mistake self-critique for virtue, not seeing that in aligning with those who seek Israel’s end, they do not gain moral stature; they forfeit moral clarity. In fighting for causes that vilify their own people, they fail to see how easily empathy can be turned against them.
We are now living with the consequences of forgetting our own story, and of letting others become its authors.
A Crisis of Memory and Identity
The Jewish bond to the land of Israel is not a modern invention. It stretches across millennia, from the Psalms of David to the whispered prayers of exiles. Jerusalem was never a metaphor. It was, and remains, a homeland.
Israel’s creation was not a colonial conquest; it was part of the global post-war process of decolonization. The UN voted to establish both Jewish and Arab states. Only one was rejected by its neighbors and has had to defend itself ever since.
To deny this history is not a political argument. It is an assault on Jewish identity itself.
When our own people adopt these narratives, the damage is doubled. We risk not only eroding the world’s understanding of Israel but unraveling the fabric of Jewish peoplehood from within.
The True Danger: Indifference
The Jewish people have survived persecution, exile, and hatred. What we have never survived is apathy, especially from within.
Throughout our history, our greatest vulnerabilities have not come from our enemies, but from within: from fracture, from forgetting, from division.
If we allow Israel to become a source of shame rather than pride, if we treat Jewish sovereignty as a liability rather than a birthright, we risk surrendering the very future we claim to defend.
Philanthropy can build buildings. Education can build institutions. But only memory and identity can sustain a people across generations.
What Comes Next
We must teach our youth that supporting Israel and pursuing justice are not in conflict but are threads of the same fabric. We must model pride without arrogance, compassion without confusion, and faith without fear.
We cannot allow Jewish identity to be shaped by the algorithms of social media or filtered through the lens of outrage.
When a city ballot accuses Israel of crimes against humanity, it threatens not only democracy but the very continuity of the Jewish people.
The question is not what Somerville has done, but what we are prepared to do in response.
Will we reclaim our story, or allow it to be rewritten by others?
Will we stand for truth, or remain silent as distortion takes root?
The Jewish future depends not only on what we remember, but on whether we have the courage to defend it.
