A City Council decision on divesting Cambridge from businesses seen as intertwined in Israel actions against Palestinians was delayed Tuesday. It will be taken up in a special meeting to be held before Nov. 2, but the date has not been set.
Discussion by councillors had itself been delayed after more than 350 public speakers filled Monday’s meeting. There was more than six hours of residents and activists coming to the lectern in City Hall’s Sullivan Chamber or dialing in remotely in support or opposition of divestments or support or opposition for Israel’s actions responding to a Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack out of Gaza.
The Tuesday meeting was held for council discussion of the full agenda, including the divestment request from councillors Ayah Al-Zubi and Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler focused on city pension fund investments and a supporting order seeking advice from the Law Department on enacting divestment. Both orders move to the council’s Ordinance Committee to consider actions. The authors want a report during the upcoming budget process on feasibility and a timeline for implementation “no more than six months from the enactment” of the main order.
Though the backup meeting was set up ahead of time with the expectation that Monday’s would fill with public comment, the council had only two hours before needing to clear the chamber for a committee hearing – and got to the divestment issue in the second hour. Vice mayor Burhan used his “charter right” to stop discussion and bump it to a next meeting.
“This is a very sensitive topic,” Azeem said. “We only have 40 minutes until we have to be out of this room, and still a deep and long agenda ahead of us. I’m hoping that we can have a special meeting where we can work on language and pass something.”
The dynamic repeated for the order seeking Law Department advice. “Given that my colleague already exercised his charter right on the first one and I think these are inextricably tied and we need to have the conversation together,” councillor Patty Nolan said, “I will exercise my charter right.”
The next regular council meeting is Nov. 2, which mayor Sumbul Siddiqui called “a long ways away.” She agreed a special meeting was warranted “given the the importance of this,” and a late policy order was introduced by Sobrinho-Wheeler to call one. The special-meeting proposal passed 8-1, with Al-Zubi opposed because the order disallowed spoken public comment. (People had “ample opportunity to comment” Monday, Sobrinho-Wheeler said.)
Charter rights
The orders, though discussed only briefly, drew some support. “I’ve said before that I don’t think we should get involved in foreign policy, and I do still think that,” said Azeem, before explaining why he thought the issue of Israel – with its “exceptional relationship” to the United States – had broken through: “I am not believing that Israel is handling itself so exceptionally,” he said, and actions such as president Ronald Reagan took, pausing weapon sales in response to Israeli military actions, “fits into a line of American tradition. While I would rather not be here, and if Israel changes its actions, I would be happy to say we don’t need to be doing this, I do not think that is the current case.”
In charter righting the supporting order, Nolan said that the issue was that she “can support divestment, not this language.”
“If the intent is to ensure our city funds do not fund terror or war crimes or equally horrific acts, then the process must be just and fair and include all problematic companies. As written, the policy orders are not fair or equitable or just. They single out one country,” Nolan said. “What about our own government’s actions, China’s brutal repression, Russia’s targeting civilians, South Sudan’s massacres? We could go on and on and on. Which companies that we’re invested in are tied to those directly or indirectly and deserve divestment?”
Framing the orders
In proposing the orders, Al-Zubi and Sobrinho-Wheeler referred to similar past actions by the council – Sobrinho-Wheeler went back to a 1980 order around South Africa’s apartheid regime – and came prepared to answer questions that had complicated past divestment efforts. “All the ordinances that we talk about, that we pass, have both a practical component and a symbolic component … when the City Council passed a fossil fuel-free ordinance, we knew that it wasn’t going to end climate change by itself,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said. “The practical component of this ordinance is redirecting city funds, and those are real dollars and real investments in city contracts. And the symbolic component is condemning violence and genocide.”
Al-Zubi assured “colleagues who might raise legal concerns” that the order was on solid ground, pointing to a lawsuit that followed Northampton’s passage of a similar measure and was dismissed.
“State law gives pension decisions to the retirement board, and the city investments are the manager’s call,” Al-Zubi said. “Every line in this order is a request. It doesn’t spend money, and it doesn’t bind anyone.” Affected investments make up about 1 percent of the city’s portfolio, she said.
Councillors knew the orders would be controversial, though, and what they were in for Monday: When a similar motion was before the council in 2021, a second meeting was needed because public comment alone took 7.5 hours, with 486 people speaking from 5:30 p.m. to nearly 1 a.m. the next day.
Somerville divestment
Neighboring Somerville has been wrestling with divestment too, in the form of an “ethical procurement” policy proposed in June that calls on the mayor and city staff to stop Somerville from financially supporting – through investments or business dealings with companies – apartheid, genocide, unlawful military occupation or war crimes.
In November, 56 percent of total votes on a nonbinding divestment question were in favor, or 11,599 ballots, compared with 38 percent of total votes who didn’t favor the policy, or 7,992 ballots.
The proposed ordinance names Israel and Palestine “because we were asked to do that specifically by the people who elected us,” said co-sponsor and councilor Ben Ewen-Campen, although “of course we are not arguing that we should give our public support to these same violations elsewhere in the world.”
