Boulder Colorado – Nablus, West Bank, Palestine Sister City Project: ADL Tried To Derail (What A Surprise!)

An all too common scene: Palestinian Youth Arrested in West Bank for protesting Israeli bombing of Gaza…Jan, 2013

The Boulder-Nablus Sister City Project has been functioning out of Boulder Colorado for several years now. I don’t work with them, but have met and had coffee with a few of the key players in that organization and very much like the tone and the content of what they are trying to do – essentially build – if you like – `people to people’ relationships between Boulder Colorado and Nablus, West Bank, Palestine.

I would hope that the city of Boulder, with its humanistic, environmentally friendly traditions would not give into such pressures  that they are now experiencing that would torpedo the project and that they, the city council, evaluate the Boulder-Nablus sister city project on its own, very considerable merits.

If, on some vague level, the project is – as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) suggests – `political’, it is so in the sense that any and all human relationships are, on some level political, either for their direct political program or lack there of.The work of this project is thoughtful, carefully thought out and within a generically humanistic tradition of building non-governmental human bridges between Boulder, Nablus and the people in both places.

Actually it is not the project itself that is political so much as the Anti-Defamation League’s, brain-dead, narrow-minded, bullying and typically bigoted (when it comes to anything having to do with Middle East oriented peace activities) approach that has politicized the issue and made it into a political football that it shouldn’t be.

Nor is this the first time that the ADL has intervened, in an attempt to shape or control the public dialogue when it comes to Israel – Palestine.  It has happened frequently here in Colorado and elsewhere. I cite as examples, simply two local cases; there are a gazillion more:

– the full court press that the ADL, in coordination with a number of local rabbis to derail the founding convention of Friends of Sabeel in Colorado seven years ago. Great pressure was placed on the Montview Presbyterian Church at the time, to cancel the event.  Breaking with an unspoken tradition, to its credit at the time, Montview did not capitulate to that pressure. Friends of Sabeel, a generally moderate supporter of Israeli-Palestinian peace making, has been targeted and smeared ever since, one of many peace organizations that the Israel’s supporters has tried to bully into silence. In fact, the ADL has a history of targeting not so much the more radical, but the more moderate elements in the peace movement, those whom they fear might bring their views on the Israeli-Palestinian issue into the mainstream – be it to academia, city government, or more mainstream religious institutions.

– then there was the ADL offices in Boulder, set up primarily to spy upon and counter the influence of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, but I’ll let the Center speak for itself, elaborate on that one if it so wishes. There are other such cases one could cite locally, but why beat a dead horse?

If the ADL was serious as it claims to be publicly, for a solution to the Israeli/Palestinian crisis, they would actually be encouraging the Boulder-Nablus Sister City project, not undermining it using their well-worn tactics. What is `anti-Jewish’, `anti-semitic’, or frankly anti-Israel about a relationship between the two cities? Nothing. Is it more that such a relationship is not `filtered’ through ADL approved channels or contacts? In fact, I would argue that creating such a sister-city relationship would be a very Jewish thing to do, well within Jewish traditions of sympathy and solidarity with oppressed peoples. 

The ADL is an organization that has wandered far from its roots, long past its prime. My own impression that it is an un-reformable Cold War relic out of touch with mainstream thinking in today’s American Jewish Community, especially its youth. It would be doing the Jewish Community a genuine favor if it urged its Alan Deshowitzes, Abe Foxmans into retirement, either gently or less so, closed shop and thought about putting together a new Jewish civil rights organization (one is certainly still needed) not funded by rightwing Jewish billionaire developers and their shyster legal teams, trying to clean up their past crimes through philanthropy (the Rockefeller tradition).

Jews in the United States need a politically active civil rights organization but one that reflects the current realities of being Jewish in America, and that includes a growing wave of sympathy for Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation; true, anti-semitism is far from dead and as is well known on the rise. Ironically the place where it is most on the rise is among the Christian Right, nut cases like John Hagee, exactly the types with which that the ADL and AIPAC find common cause, especially where it concerns yet strengthening and tightening the Israeli hold on the West Bank and denying the Palestinians their right to a national homeland.

These past decades, the ADL has a long and sorry history of obstructionism, outright spying on peace movements, sharing information with the FBI, illegal wiretapping ( a case in Colorado where the ADL was fined $60 million in the late 1990s), etc. etc. Such is the Abe Foxman legacy – turning an organization that once upon a time was one of America’s vanguard civil rights organizations into little more than a watchdog for Israel in the United States. According to Victor Navasky, even in earlier days, during the dark days of McCarthyism, the ADL cooperated with the FBI in `naming names’ of its more liberal and left-wing members in exchange for the FBI not going after the organization as a whole. I do not know whether the Mountain States ADL keeps tabs, careful records on Colorado  peace activists, but that is what has gone on in other regional offices, so it is logical to assume that similar practices could take place here in Colorado.

Below is an email sent out by Tom Mayer, from the Colorado Coalition Against Attacking Iran. It has some information about the Boulder-Nablus Sister City Project and information about how to contact the Boulder City Council…

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Hello peace and justice activists: