For well over a year, anti-Israel activists have demanded week after week that the Pasadena City Council divest from investments in companies doing business with Israel.\u00a0 The campaign is part of a national and international crusade, referred to as Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS), with the ultimate goal to delegitimize and ultimately abolish the state of Israel as we know it today. The council\u2019s moment of truth will come at its May 11 meeting.<\/p>\n
Pasadena City Council members have heard these activists accuse Israel of monstrous crimes, often using words like \u201cgenocide\u201d and \u201capartheid\u201d (even though such allegations are hotly contested and rejected by the U.S.), demanding that Pasadena join the BDS movement. And they have used coded words like \u201cglobalist\u201d and \u201cZionist\u201d (usurping its true meaning), to denigrate and alienate Jews (and non-Jews) who support Israel\u2019s right to exist. They have likened Zionism to colonialism, ignoring thousands of years of history.<\/p>\n
Pasadena currently has no direct investments in Israeli companies, or companies that do business with Israel. As such, the demands being made would have no meaningful economic effect. Which raises the obvious question: if it would accomplish nothing, why demand it?<\/p>\n
Because the exercise is symbolic. It is political theater. The BDS effort is designed to eliminate the Jewish state with economic strangulation as Hamas and Hezbollah sought to with bombs and bullets.<\/p>\n
Across the country, BDS campaigns have focused on city councils, universities and pension boards as venues for passing symbolic resolutions designed to delegitimize Israel and portray it \u2014 and those who support it \u2014 as moral outcasts, collectively blaming anyone who supports and recognizes Israel\u2019s right to exist as a Jewish state.<\/p>\n
In 2016, the state of California passed legislation (AB 2844) prohibiting \u201cpublic agencies that receive $100,000 or more in state funding\u201d from divesting from foreign nations, specifically calling out Israel in the legal text, because doing so would be discrimination. Entities that do divest risk losing state dollars.<\/p>\n
The latest war between Hamas and Israel, which began on Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel, murdering 1,200 Israelis, and kidnapping 250 others. And yet, almost immediately, the current campaign blaming Israel began. However, this important fact is irrelevant to the activists who have turned Pasadena City Council meetings into protest rallies.<\/p>\n
Locally, the Jewish community has had to deal with this open hostility because people see us as Israel\u2019s proxy, increasing the frequency and intensity of anti-Jewish hatred.<\/p>\n
In February, the Jewish Federation of the Greater San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys wrote to the City Council urging it to reject BDS, quoting a warning from the Pasadena Jewish Center and Temple, itself a recent victim of antisemitic graffiti:<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen anti-Israel rhetoric gets normalized, it provides a permission structure for those who hold violent antisemitic feelings to act. This makes anyone who supports Israel\u201480 to 90 percent of Jews\u2014an acceptable target for hatred and violence. By cloaking evil with \u2018ethics,\u2019 it gives those who wish to do harm license to do so.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is one of many reasons these concerns cannot be ignored or taken lightly. The Pasadena City Council must not be intimidated by the ongoing calls to single Israel out in any council action.<\/p>\n
At the council\u2019s May 11 meeting, members will consider whether to revise the city\u2019s existing Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investment policy. It is imperative that any revision does not target Israel in any way,\u00a0 setting a double standard not used for other countries.<\/p>\n
The council should affirm its mission is to govern Pasadena \u2014 not weigh in on foreign policy or adjudicate distant conflicts, particularly if doing so will harm some of its constituents.<\/p>\n
Symbolic sanctions against Israel will do nothing to advance the interests of Pasadena residents, but rather, increase the targeted hatred toward Jews that we continue to witness and experience day after day.<\/p>\n
Terry Tornek is a former mayor of Pasadena.<\/p>\n
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