Hacking a township

The US general election day is approaching fast, with the portentous choice between Harris and Trump on everyone’s mind. But the ballots here in the US are long, with a lot of people and issues to decide on: votes on state senators, and county auditors, and city council members fill the bulletin. My little town of Urbana, Illinois has also a couple of referendum questions to answer: about having some new taxes or eliminating some county positions. And this one, too:

“Shall the United States federal government and subordinate divisions stop giving military funding to Israel, which currently costs taxpayers 3.8 billion dollars a year, given Israel’s global recognition as an apartheid regime with a tract record of human rights violations?”

CUNNINGHAM TOWNSHIP QUESTION 1,

part of the OFFICIAL BALLOT, GENERAL ELECTION, NOVEMBER 5, 2024 CHAMPAIGN COUNTY, ILLINOIS

This question is pure poison: whether you answer Yes or No, your vote serves to support the idea that Israel is an apartheid regime. (This a textbook example of a loaded question, a fallacy type known to at least Aristotle. Everyone knows the Did you stop beating your wife, Yes or No version of it.)

This question landed on the ballot in our quaint Midwestern town as a result of a clever hack. (One can hack a screwdriver to open a bottle, an MySQL query to steal a database, and, turns out, one can hack a boring meeting in a city-run charity.)

The honest route to place an advisory question on a ballot requires collecting a few thousands of signatures in a town of our size, or having it approved by a governing body of a town office, like a school board. Going either route seems to be hard (few elected officials suffer from high enough anti-Zionist fever).

But as we found out, for our city charity, Cunningham Township, the governing body is, once a year, whoever shows up at the meeting. Literally. So, some nameless activists mobilized fifty or so enthusiasts who packed the room, and here we are. (If you wonder how this kind of ochlocracy is possible, welcome to small town America: this is the e pluribus part for you.)

This little coup was well organized, and not just locally. Some groups tried to place the same question (word for word, comma for comma), in the same way on the ballots in a couple of neighboring Central Illinois towns.

We do not know who is behind these efforts. It is clear, however, that they do not aspire to influence the US government and “subordinate divisions”. (To wit, this is not the first missive our town is sending to the big guys; earlier efforts, like a 2003 City Council resolution asking, inter alia, to remove UN sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s regime, went unnoticed.)

The real target of this question is not some powers outside the city limits, – it’s the people within them. Seeing the officially looking question, unaware of the manner it was placed on the ballot, an unsuspected voter without much exposure to the depth and intricacy of the Middle East history and politics will take the insidious message, – Israel is an apartheid regime, – on its face value. And this is the key goal of this whole exercise: propaganda, making sure that the lie finds its way into the minds of the voters.

The goal of this brazen political stunt is to obscure the plain truth: that Israel is a liberal democracy. A flawed democracy, like all of them, but striving to become a better home for its people. And doing this, unlike other liberal democracies, while fighting a war the Jewish state neither started nor wanted.

The organizers of this referendum were innovative in their method, but not in their message: the campaign to label Israel as a racist state would feel tired to Brezhnev’s Politburo. Still, there is something especially galling about branding Israel an apartheid state coming from the crowd that spends their working hours pretending to worry about minorities here, in the US.

Not that they shouldn’t. The inequities in America are obvious, and manifold. Take just one metric, close to my hometown, – which is also home of the University of Illinois, one of the best public universities in the country, with many departments stably occupying top positions in the world rankings.

How do we do in terms of racial equity, you’ll ask? Well, in a state where African-Americans account for around 16% of the population, Black students constitute less than 6% of our campus enrollment. Hispanics are doing better, but their representation on campus is nowhere close to their state share of population. And these gaps are systemic, stubbornly refusing to react to the numerous efforts of the administration to remedy them.

I was thinking about this in Haifa, when I was visiting friends and colleagues at Technion a month ago. As during my past visits, I was rejoiced seeing many Muslim women students on campus. I checked the statistics: indeed, the fraction of Arab students in Technion matches (perhaps, even exceeds a bit) the fraction of Arab Israeli citizens.

It wasn’t always the case, – twenty years ago, the situation at the Technion was similar to that at the UIUC. But the Arab and Jewish communities got together, aligned their forces with the Technion leaders, philanthropists, civil society, and solved it.

Wouldn’t it make sense for the anti-Zionist crowd of Urbana to visit Haifa, and to learn, finally, how to do equity, something they so much love talking about but so unable to realize?

Or, if they insist still that Israel is an apartheid society, shouldn’t they ask the US government (and its “subordinate divisions”) to stop sending any money to our campus?

Perhaps this should be the referendum question to force Urbana to vote on next year…