On election night, while all eyes focused on the New York City mayoral race, my attention concentrated on Question 3 of the Somerville, MA ballot. Somerville, a town with a population of 80,000, lies just north of Boston. Although I don’t live there, the outcome of Question 3 had implications beyond Somerville, and I was scared.
Question 3 asked: “shall the Mayor of Somerville and all Somerville elected leaders be instructed to end all current city business and prohibit future city investments and contracts with companies as long as such companies engage in business that sustains Israel’s apartheid, genocide and illegal occupation of Palestine?”
The content and structure of this question not only propagated division but also presented an illegal and likely impossible implementation of policy. The nature of the question was surprising, and the outcome never aimed to have any real-world effect. As permitted under M.G.L. c. 53, § 18A of Massachusetts law, non-binding questions like this allow voters to express their views and advise governing bodies but do not actually result in actionable or legally binding outcomes. Typically, non-binding questions address issues that directly impact local voters, such as education, taxation, or healthcare, but international conflicts like in Question 3 rarely appear.
Moreover, the proposal as written was likely illegal to enforce. Proponents of Question 3 pointed to the city’s $1.7 million in contracts with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HP) over the last decade and demanded that the town void the relationship. HP, a multinational corporation, “provides servers for Israel’s Aviv System, which defines the rights of Palestinians through the ethnically-segregated ID card system,” according to an op-ed in support of Question 3 in The Tufts Daily. Under the M.G.L. c. 30B, the “Uniform Procurement Act,” Massachusetts cities must follow specific procurement procedures designed to ensure transparency, competition, and fairness in municipal contracting. Somerville’s proposed prohibition of “future city investments and contracts” based on the criteria cited would both violate state procurement law and be practically unenforceable due to its vague framing.
Opponents of Question 3 also warned of the practical consequences of implementation, with one writer for the Somerville Times expressing: “students will lose their HP Chromebooks. The city won’t be able to rebuild the Winter Hill Community School, repair our streets, or build new bike lanes. The city would have to run without Microsoft, Google, or Apple technology. And Somerville would lose the opportunity to be part of the next job-creating wave of lifesaving healthcare innovations.” Nevertheless, Question 3 passed with 11,489 votes in support and 7,920 opposed.
Why was the city of Somerville voting on a ballot question that could never be implemented and had no practical implications for the city’s daily operations and governance? Devoting energy to an advisory question with no relevance to Somerville amounted to little more than soliciting symbolic opinions on a distant, controversial issue, potentially at the expense of addressing concrete local concerns. As Mayor-Elect Jack Wilson said, reflecting on the ballot question: “given the non-binding status of the ballot question and the illegality of its main demand, we’re left with a symbolic ballot question that guarantees one group in our community will end up feeling alienated from their city, no matter the outcome.”
The campaigning behind Question 3 exploited the ballot as a platform to promote a divisive agenda: “Zionists” are not welcome in Somerville. Question 3 didn’t just gesture symbolically; rather, it provided a stage to legitimize polarizing rhetoric and delegitimize the State of Israel in the process. This aspect seems to be why so much energy went into a seemingly meaningless measure. For a city that prides itself on progressive, inclusive values, Boston has publicly denounced many community members. While many proponents of the measure deny that anti-Semitism was involved, the reality is that this ballot affects Jewish residents most.
The language used in Question 3—words like “apartheid,” “genocide,” and “illegal occupation”—felt deeply hurtful and painful to me as a Jewish person. I found it misguided to introduce these charged terms presented as if they were uncontested facts, rather than opinions and theoretical frameworks. For me, the ballot question was a painful sign that I was not welcome in this nearby Massachusetts city. Without space for debate, education, and nuanced dialogue, the mainstreaming of language such as that in Question 3 not only promotes antisemitism, but also leads to misinformation about the complicated conflict in the Middle East. Somerville has become the first U.S. municipality to pass a divestment measure aimed at Israel; I worry it will not be the last.
While these 800 words will not alter the outcome of last week’s Somerville election, I hope that by unpacking what happened in Somerville, we at Milton can be informed, active citizens. Most of us may not live in Somerville, but studying this election can help us understand what happened and recognize its implications within Somerville and beyond. We must not accept the status quo, but instead balance having a place for debate of hard topics with having a place for calling out pervasive, divisive, and hurtful actions and language before they become the norm.