By CARLOS SAPIR
This summer, Palestine solidarity activists in Pittsburgh, Pa., rallying behind the slogan “No War Crimes On Our Dime!” organized to propose a ballot measure that would force the city to divest from companies complicit in war crimes relating to Israel’s ongoing invasion and genocide in Gaza. The petition was met with overwhelmingly positive support from the public, and was able to cross the minimum number of signatures needed for ballot access.
Democrats in city government were terrified of the prospect of the measure reaching the ballot in November. The politicians, as well as local Zionist organizations, took rapid legal action to intimidate organizers and force it off the ballot.
Despite the fact that people in Pittsburgh will not be able to vote on the city’s (intimate and profitable) relationship with the Israeli state this November, campaign organizers refuse to give up. What’s more, they’re encouraged by the staggeringly positive public response that they witnessed while campaigning, and see the relative success of the campaign both as a step forward in unmasking the undemocratic nature of U.S. politics and as a segue to organizing protests and building a mass movement for Palestinian liberation.
Against all odds
The ballot measure faced long odds from the start, and ignored much of the conventional wisdom associated with ballot measures and other electoral organizing. Rather than being planned months in advance with full-time staffers and a fund to finance to the campaign, No War Crimes On Our Dime got started two weeks late into the petitioning season and was initially started by a group of local activists who had come together to support the student encampments at the University of Pittsburgh in April. What the campaign lacked in resources, it made up for with enthusiasm, shared not only by the starting coalition but also by the public it reached out to, which flocked to further support the campaign through volunteering and donations.
Throughout the campaign, organizers were very clear that they viewed the campaign not just as an end in itself, but primarily as a way to talk to people about the ongoing genocide in Palestine and to push them into political action around it. Even if the ballot measure had made it to the election and been approved, its implementation would require extensive, prolonged legal battles on a time scale that is totally insensitive to the ongoing suffering of Palestinians.
The full text of the petition statement read as follows: “Shall the Pittsburgh Home Rule Charter be amended and supplemented by a new article prohibiting investment or allocation of public funds, including tax exemptions, to entities that conduct business operations with or in the state of Israel unless and until Israel ends its military action in Gaza, fully allows humanitarian assistance to reach the people of Gaza, and grants equal rights to every person living in the territories under Israeli control?”
Democrats and Zionists against democracy
The challenges against the petition came in various forms, and displayed a general contempt for democracy and working people’s political views. On behalf of the Democratic-controlled city government, city controller Rachel Heisler challenged that the measure was unenforceable and should be dismissed on procedural grounds. Heisler contended that, despite ballot measure descriptions having a strict, low word count, the measure needed to have a fully articulated legal implementation drafted in advance. This kind of objection all but precludes that a working-class person (or anyone else without a well-funded legal team) could meaningfully impact city policy.
Ironically, in further arguments Heisler essentially made the case that the referendum is incompatible with capitalism, saying that a core obstacle for the ballot measure’s implementation is that “we live in a global economy,” proceeding to list the myriad companies that the city has contracts with that also do business with Israel. While campaign organizers specified in response that they had a narrower definition of “investment or allocation of funds” in relation to the businesses affected and that they believe that the measure would ultimately be enforceable, it is nevertheless a stunning admission of the moral failures of capitalism that it is apparently “impossible” to economically disentangle a North American city from complicity in a genocide occurring on another continent.
Meanwhile, the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, part of the Jewish Federations of North America, a network of well-funded non-profit organizations, launched its own attacks. On legal grounds, it contended that 10,000 of the 15,000 signatures gathered were illegitimate for one reason or another. This takes advantage of the antidemocratic fine print of the ballot measure process. Not only is there an incredibly high bar of signatures needed to get access to the ballot, signatures collected can be discarded for any of a number of reasons. For example, signees listing “Pitt” or “PGH” instead of “Pittsburgh” in the City box are invalid according to the official rules. Signatures were also challenged for allegedly being illegible, an assertion which could be contested by the campaign, but only by cross-referencing the signature with a voter database, an expensive and time-consuming process.
At the same time, the Jewish Federation made extensive, slanderous comments to the media, denouncing the campaign as antisemitic. This is despite the fact that the campaign’s organizers were themselves disproportionately Jewish, with many of them expressing the fact that Israel’s misappropriation of Jewish identity was a motivating factor in their Palestine solidarity organizing. These attacks were accompanied by the doxxing of petition signatures on social media. In particular, social media pressure was directed against city government employees signing the petition, and a communications manager from Democratic Mayor Ed Gainey’s office was pressured into resigning. This doxxing, of course, is yet another antidemocratic feature of the ballot measure system, making anyone who organizes or participates in a ballot measure campaign a potential target of harassment.
What comes next for Palestine organizing?
Ultimately, despite having abundantly demonstrated that their campaign represents popular opinion, the ballot measure system is set up such that the side with the best legal team wins. Recognizing that they would not be able to win against this process, the campaign withdrew the ballot measure and committed to regathering its forces.
Ballot measures often provide an excellent vehicle to agitate for political demands in an immediate, unavoidable fashion. At every step of their implementation, they press upon a core contradiction of bourgeois democracy, between the illusion that popular votes mean that our government is “ruled by the people” and the reality that bourgeois law puts countless obstacles in the way of working-class participation politics, and that the Democratic and Republican parties expend every effort to block and derail political activity outside the margins of voting for their candidates.
First there is the inhuman struggle to collect tens of thousands of signatures in only a few weeks’ time. Then there is the legal challenge to the signatures and unfair bourgeois media campaigns against the measure. Then there is actual campaigning, followed by the virtually inevitable bourgeois refusal to meaningfully implement the measures even once approved. In this way, ballot measures provide an opportunity to engage people in political discussion in a way that naturally pushes them towards political action, while demonstrating the limitations of our existing political system without conceding a single principle in the process. If, as Rosa Luxembug wrote, “Those who do not move do not notice their chains,” organizing ballot measure campaigns pushes people to move.
Coupled together with street protests, public education events, and union solidarity organizing, the ballot measure campaign can be an effective engine in helping build a mass movement. Organizers in Pittsburgh hope that Palestine solidarity organizers around the country can use their efforts as a model.
A second ballot measure campaign, this time with more pre-planning and all of the contacts that came from the first campaign, is also a viable prospect. At the same time, the momentum towards solidarity organizing created by the campaign now coincides with students returning to campus, providing an exciting opportunity for students and workers to unite their Palestine organizing efforts.